Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of Mathematics Bob Bosch recently gave two talks at the invitation-only Gathering for Gardner Conference, held in Atlanta every two years in honor of Martin Gardner, who wrote Scientific American’s "Mathematical Games" column from 1956 to 1981.

Bosch's first talk, "Numerically Balanced Dice," a collaboration with The Dice Lab's Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman, unveiled the world's first mass-produced injection-molded 120-sided die (based on the disdyakis triacontahedron). The die is numerically balanced in that numbers on opposite sides sum to 121, and all of the vertex sums are exactly what they should be (the degree of the vertex times the average of the numbers on the die).

Bosch's second talk, "Game-of-Life Animations," presented Game-of-Life patterns that resemble works of art (including a Magritte still life, a portrait of John Horton Conway, the game's inventor, and two animations based on Eadward Muybridge's locomotion studies).

Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling made five presentations, participated in two roundtable panels, and presented three research papers at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence in Baltimore.

For the Editor’s roundtable panel, Darling discussed writing and publication. She discussed professional issues for the roundtable Navigating the Mid-Career Years.

The three research papers Darling presented included:

• A Dynamic Systems Simulation of the Patterning of Attachment Dyads: Co-authored by student Caitlyn Grubb and alumnus Ian Burns, the work grew out of Darling and Grubb’s work in an advanced methods course last Spring. It used the Nova software developed by Professor of Computer Science Richard Salter to model social networks of dating couples in early adulthood.
• Seeking and Providing Support: Are There Normative Differences in Adolescent and Adult Romantic Dyads?: Based on observational data coded by teams of Oberlin students, the work was co-authored by Grubb and student Kinsey Denney.
• Adolescent Information within the Family Context: This work continues Darling’s studies of adolescent disclosure and lying in a longitudinal study of Chilean youth.

A paper coauthored by Professor of Computer Science Richard Salter was presented on April 4 at the 2016 Spring Simulation Multi-Conference of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International in Pasadena, California. The paper, "An Agent-Based Model of School Closing in Under-Vaccinated Communities During Measles Outbreaks”, was presented by Salter’s colleague and co-author, Wayne M. Getz, professor of ecology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Salter and Getz used the 2014-15 measles outbreak in California as the basis for a stochastic, spatially-structured, agent-based Nova model of the spread of infection. The model shows that immunity within a locality requires vaccination coverage of at least 85 percent, and that a policy of “sending unvaccinated students home from school” in low coverage communities is extremely effective in shutting down outbreaks of measles. Salter was once again responsible for design and creation of the model, which joins eight other conference and journal papers using Salter’s Nova platform published in the last 18 months.

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager served as the discussant for the panel "Unfamiliar Border: Rediscovering the Division of Korea and Its Unknown Stories" at the annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies, held in Seattle March 31 through April 3.

Seventy years after the 1945 liberation of Korea, many Koreans accept the division of Korea as a "natural" and familiar state of affairs. Instead of the superpowers' decisions about Korea's division, the four presentations discussed by Jager focused on the Korean people's experiences, choices, migrations, and life stories propelled by the crises of the division.

James H. Fairchild Professor of Religion and East Asian Studies James Dobbins presented the annual Taitetsu Unno Memorial Lecture at Smith College on March 25. The title of his lecture was “Going to Hell Chanting Amida Buddha’s Name: D.T. Suzuki’s Modern Reading of Pure Land Buddhism."

Tim Scholl, professor of Russian and comparative literature and director of the Oberlin Center for Languages and Cultures (OCLC), presented a series of lectures for the Michigan Opera Theatre and the University of Michigan for the University Musical Society. The lectures were presented with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Crystal Biruk delivered an invited lecture to Johns Hopkins University's Critical Global Health Seminar on March 22.

Assistant Professor of Classics Christopher Trinacty recently published a chapter in the edited volume Roman Drama and its Contexts. The volume features many of the leading scholars in Roman comedy and tragedy. Trinacty's piece, "Tragic Translatio: Epistle 107 and Senecan Tragedy," examines Seneca's translation practices in his prose and poetic works. Trinacty argues for the importance of intratextual and intertextual clues for understanding Seneca's hermeneutics of translation in the piece.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Christi M. Smith has published “From Vice to Virtue: Racial Boundaries and Redemption Narratives in Late 19th-Century Appalachian Feuds.” See a PDF of the article.

Smith shares her research on higher education access for African Americans in the 1870s with Aisha Tyler on TLC's Who Do You Think You Are? Smith and Oberlin College Archivist Ken Grossi researched Tyler's family ties to Oberlin College. The segment filmed in the Oberlin College Archives in December 2015 and airs at 9 p.m. on April 3.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Alberto Zambenedetti was asked to join the 2016 Cleveland Arts Prize jury for the Visual Arts category.