Faculty and Staff Notes

Economics Assistant Professor Martin Saavedra was invited to present his paper, “The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Fetal Origins Hypothesis: Evidence from Linked Data," at a workshop hosted by National Association of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Assistant Professor of Economics Martin Saavedra presented at the 92nd Annual Western Economic Association International conference (WEAI) from June 25-29, 2017 in San Diego.

Ellen Wurtzel, associate professor of history, was interviewed for the Royal Studies Journal blog about her article "The Joyous Entry of Albert and Isabella in Lille: History, Conquest and the Making of Belgium” which appeared in a December 2016 issue of the Royal Studies Journal (RSJ) called Taking Possession: Royal Entries in the Early Modern Period. The piece was developed from a paper she delivered at the 2015 Sixteenth-Century Studies annual conference and investigates the way that the city’s history was used to establish loyalty to the prince and envision a new empire in the midst of war and religious conflict.

Jason Stalnaker, associate professor of physics, has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to look for dark matter.  The grant is a collaboration with Derek Jackson Kimball at California State University, East Bay. The funds will be used to establish a precision optical magnetometer at Oberlin College that will be a part of a global network of optical magnetometers looking for anomalous spin couplings due to dark matter.

Assistant Professor of History Danielle Terrazas Williams was recently nominated and appointed to the President’s Council of Cornell Women.

Elizabeth Hamilton, associate professor of German, translated with her student, Leo R. Kalkbrenner, ""Diagnoses That Matter: My Great-Grandmother's Murder as One Deemed 'Unworthy of Living' and Its Impact on Our Family," by Andreas Hechler. The translation was published in Disability Studies Quarterly.

Charles McGuire, professor of musicology, has launched the Musical Festivals Database (MFD), a online tool that allows users explore and research the performance history of British Musical Festivals between 1695-1940. The programming and implementation of the database musicalfestivals.org is a collaboration between the Oberlin College Library, Oberlin College and Conservatory, the Five Colleges of Ohio, the Mellon Foundation, and Duke University’s Digital Scholarship Services. Due to the efforts of Oberlin and Duke student research assistants, one can use the MFD to search more than 500 festivals online, find out when and where a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor worked in Great Britain, and what was performed. The database is part of McGuire’s long-standing project to research musical festivals and the history of performance in order to implement within the Oberlin classroom a broader discussion of what music history was and is.

Professor of Psychology Cindy Frantz was interviewed for the story, "Finding The Middle in the Incivility War" on NPR's All Things Considered.