Faculty and Staff Notes

Crystal Biruk, assistant professor of anthropology, presented a chapter of her book in progress at Dreaming of Health and Science in Africa: Aesthetics, Affects, Poetics, and Politics, a conference convened at the Wellcome Trust Conference Center in Cambridgeshire, UK, June 13-15.

Richard Salter, professor of computer science, and Nancy Darling, professor of psychology, gave the 70-minute demonstration "Nova: A New Tool for System Dynamics, Agent-Based, and Spatial Modeling” at the Innovations in Collaborative Modeling conference held at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, on June 4. Drawn from Darling’s research, the demonstration applied the Nova modeling system to an example of social contagion of problem behavior in the classroom. Salter described how Nova, which he designed and implemented, was used to create that and other computational models.

At the same time, Wayne M. Getz, A. Starker Leopold professor of wildlife ecology at UC Berkeley, presented at the DIMACS MPE 2013+ Workshop on Management of Natural Resources about joint work with Salter. The paper, entitled “A Nova Model and Web App for Sustainable Harvesting and Population Viability Analyses in Teaching and Research,” discusses the application of the Nova software platform to constructing models and web applications for both harvesting and population viability analyses of African wildlife—particularly issues concerning rhino conservation.

Salter, Darling, Getz, and modeling expert Tony Starfield will all be at Oberlin College June 15-19 for the Workshop on Quantitative Reasoning Pedagogy & Computational Modeling with Nova Software, held in collaboration with the CLEAR center.

Assistant Professor of Integrated Media Art Julia Christensen has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship for Fall 2015. According to Christensen, MacDowell selects just 270 fellows out of the approximate 2,800 applications it receives every year.

As a MacDowell fellow, Christensen will complete a residency at MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the oldest and most revered artist colony in the nation. She will be working on her piece The Big Feed, which is part of her Creative Capital-supported work about our cultural relationships with discarded electronics.

Home Affairs, a collaborative exhibition between Associate Professor of Studio Art Nanette Yannuzzi and Turkish-born artist Arzu Ozkal, was on display May 10-June 7 at the Art Produce Gallery in San Diego, California. The ongoing collaboration intends to challenge mainstream representations of motherhood though a photo-based, screen printing project.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Bogdan Popa has been awarded the 2015 American Political Science Association Kenneth Sherrill Best Dissertation Award for his PhD dissertation. The Kenneth Sherrill Best Dissertation Award recognizes the best dissertation on sexuality and politics completed and successfully defended in the previous two calendar years.

Popa will be teaching courses in political theory at Oberlin during the 2015-16 academic year.

The exhibition Even If by Assistant Professor of Studio Art Kristina Paabus is on view at Fernwey Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, May 15-June 14. In tandem with the show, Fernwey Editions published a series of lithographic prints, and Lauren Fulton wrote the essay “Data Mining: Kristina Paabus Mapping the Game.”

Paabus also recently had her work selected from the permanent collection at The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts for a group show, The Residents, which took place in Stalder Gallery at the Falls City Library and Art Center in Falls City, Nebraska.

An article co-authored by Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies and chair of Latin American studies, and Bécquer Seguín was published in the Nation. The article, "In Spain’s Seismic Elections, ‘It’s the Victory of David Over Goliath’," discusses the shift in Spain's local and regional elections, which have changed the country's political landscape beyond recognition.

The article “Americans, Abroad: Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady” by Sandra Zagarell, Donald R. Longman professor of English, has been published in Teaching Transatlanticism, edited by Linda Hughes and Sarah Robbins (Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

While James's' novel is commonly read as a representation of how Americans fare when they travel to the sophisticated “Old World” (Europe), this article and a companion piece Zagarell published in 2014 approach Portrait of a Lady as a keen-eyed study of postbellum upper-class Americans that "Europe" serves primarily to backlight.

Jason Haugen, assistant professor of anthropology, and Benjamin Kuperman, associate professor of computer science and chair of the computer science department, presented their research paper “A New Approach to Uto-Aztecan Lexicostatistics” on May 8 at the 18th annual Workshop on American Indigenous Languages at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The paper was co-authored by and co-presented with Michael Everdell ’13.

Alberto Zambenedetti, visiting assistant professor of cinema studies and Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow, delivered the lecture “A Proud Immigrant: Renegotiating FIAT’s ‘Ethnicity’ Question” on May 9 at the 2015 Toledo Automobile Film Festival and Academic Conference.