Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Professor of Chemistry Catherine Oertel delivered the invited talk, “Music and Materials: Art and Science of Organ Pipe Metal,” on March 29 at the spring meeting of the Materials Research Society in Phoenix. Jointly presented with professor Annette Richards, a musicologist from Cornell University, this was an interdisciplinary discussion of the aesthetics and complexity of the organ as an instrument as well as the chemistry and conservation of its pipes. The talk included results of research on organ pipe corrosion carried out with Oberlin undergraduates.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Holly Handman-Lopez has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Choreography for her evening-length dance and theater piece, "The Only Way," and "eleven years in," her duet with Bobby Wesner. "The Only Way" premiered in Oberlin in 2015, and "eleven years in" premiered in Oberlin in 2014 and has since been presented at numerous venues across the U.S.

Assistant Professor of Music Theory Megan Kaes Long has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend fellowship to support work on her monograph, Hearing Homophony: Characteristic Tonalities at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century. This summer she will travel to the British Library in London, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to view sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music prints.

Politics Chair and Professor Eve Sandberg attended faculty development workshops at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) April 14-15, 2016, in New York. Panels of policy makers and scholars discussed various American foreign policy challenges and Sandberg was tasked with playing President Obama in a simulation of the situation room regarding the current crisis in Southern Sudan.

Andaleeb Badiee Banta, curator of European and American art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, has been named the Samuel H. Kress Foundation/AAMC affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome. During her four-week stay at the American Academy, Banta will visit several significant collections of old master drawings in Rome to further her research for “Old Master Drawings @ Oberlin," a proposed online catalogue of the AMAM's European drawings.

Chie Sakakibara, assistant professor of environmental studies, served as a moderator at the Global Issues Symposium for the panel “Resilience at the Local Level: Environmental Attitude and Knowledge in Indigenous Communities” on April 8, 2016. The panelists included Caroline Cannon (Iñupiaq environmental activist from Point Hope, Alaska, Goldman Prize recipient of 2012), Amy Margaris (associate professor of anthropology), Frank Kelderman (visiting assistant professor of comparative American studies), and Matt Bahar (assistant professor of history).

Sakakibara also served as an invited panelist for the symposium Ice Cubed: An Inquiry into the Aesthetics, History, and Science of Ice at Columbia University, where she discussed the influence of climate change on indigenous peoples in the Arctic.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Crystal Biruk gave an invited lecture at a workshop on health and science in the African world on April 15 at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Taylor L. Field ’15 coauthored an article in the Journal of GLBT Families with Greggor Mattson, associate professor of sociology and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies.

The piece, “Parenting Transgender Children in PFLAG,” grew out of Field’s independent research that eventually became her sociology honors thesis and GSFS capstone. The article analyzes 14 of her interviews with the parents of transgender children drawn from PFLAG, a national support group that provides a model of "activist parenting" and was one of the first national organizations to include transgender in its mission statement.

In the piece, the parents of transgender children recounted four ways in which their parenting experiences were more difficult and isolating than those of the parents lesbian, bisexual, or gay children: the physical changes their children undergo, the lack of media representations of transgender lives, the effect of their child’s gender transition on their identity as a parent, and the tensions involved in their child’s successful transition in public settings.

Parental isolation may be alleviated, however, by recognizing four unrecognized similarities shared among parents of GLBT children: adjusting to changes in their child’s appearance, the process of grief and mourning, the tendency to hierarchically rank parental difficulties, and fears of being a bad parent. The isolation faced by parents of transgender children is imposed not only by anti-trans prejudice and lack of information, but also by the unacknowledged and undiscussed ways in which a child’s gender transition affects parental gender identities.

Taylor Field is currently a graduate student in sociology at the University of Michigan, where her project recently earned her a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Erik Inglis, professor of Medieval art history and cochair of the art department, has published “Expertise, Artifacts, and Time in the 1534 Inventory of the Saint-Denis Treasury,” in the March 2016 issue of Art Bulletin (pgs. 14-42).

Associate Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino has published “Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965-1989" in the American Historical Review (Volume 121, Issue 2, Pgs. 492-521).

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s.

Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, Sammartino argues that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War.