Faculty and Staff Notes

East Asian Studies Professor Sheila Miyoshi Jager has published a review of Hajimu Masuda's Cold War Crucibles: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World (Harvard University Press, 2015) in History: Reviews of New Books 44.5 (Jun 2016), 159.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jiyul Kim presented a public lecture sponsored by the Oberlin Heritage Center on October 18 on "The Korean War: How It Changed Our World."

Arnie Cox, associate professor of music theory and aural skills, has published a book titled Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking (Indiana University Press, October 2016).

Taking a cognitive approach to musical meaning, Cox explores embodied experiences of hearing music as those that move us both consciously and unconsciously. In a pioneering study that draws on neuroscience and music theory, Cox advances his theory of the “mimetic hypothesis,” the notion that a large part of our experience and understanding of music involves an embodied imitation in the listener of bodily motions and exertions that are involved in producing music. The book is available at http://iupress.org/9780253032317/music-and-embodied-cognition/.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand published the article, “Divine Perspective and the Plots of Zeus in the Hesoidic Catalogue,” in The Gods of Greek Hexameter Poetry: From the Archaic Age to Late Antiquity and Beyond, eds. J. Clauss, A. Kahane and M. Cuypers (Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 2016). Ormand’s article examines the literary trope — common in archaic Greek poetry — that Zeus began the Trojan War in order to reduce the Earth of its too-rapidly expanding population. In the fragments of Hesiod’s mythological poem, The Catalogue of Women (on which Ormand published a monograph in 2014), Ormand argues that we see a careful exposition of human heroes' failure to understand these events from the perspective of the Olympian gods.

Janet Fiskio, Md Rumi Shammin, and Vel Scott coauthored the article ‘‘Cultivating Community: Black Agrarianism in Cleveland, Ohio,’’ which appeared in the summer 2016 issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies.

Assistant Professor of Economics Martin Saavedra won the Arthur H. Cole prize for the best article in the Journal of Economic History 2015-2016. His paper is titled "Typhoid Fever, Water Quality, and Human Capital Formation."

The Arthur H. Cole Prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of the Journal of Economic History for the best article in the previous year’s volume of the Journal.

Assistant Professor of Economics Christopher Cotter attended the annual conference of the Economic History Association (EHA) in Boulder, Colorado, in early September. Cotter led the EHA’s Job Market Workshop, in which recent job market candidates provide advice and personal experience to economic history PhD students who will soon be on the market themselves.

This past summer, Professor of English T.S. McMillin took part in the United Nations dialogue on Harmony with Nature. The dialogue, with contributions from 127 “Experts of the Knowledge Network” representing eight disciplines, resulted in a report to the General Assembly released August 1, 2016. McMillin was asked to discuss Philosophy and Ethics. Some of his research on the Los Angeles River will appear in the forthcoming volume The Politics of Fresh Water: Access, Conflict, and Identity (Routledge 2017).

Professor of Hispanic Studies Sebastiaan Faber has co-authored an article on Barcelona’s new city government for an ongoing series in The Nation called “Cities Rising.” He also has a review essay on Adam Hochschild’s new book in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Earlier this year, he co-authored several articles in The Nation on Spanish politics, while regularly publishing pieces in the Spanish magazines FronteraD, La Marea, and Contexto.

Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology Jennifer Fraser will deliver the talk “Playing with Men: Female Singers, Porno Lyrics, and the Male Gaze in a Sumatran Vocal Genre” on Wednesday, August 10, at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Fraser has been conducting research in Sumatra, Indonesia, for approximately five weeks.

More information about her talk can be found on the Gadja Mada University website.