Faculty and Staff Notes

A team from Oberlin College presented the panel “Creating Opportunities for Innovative Digital Projects Through Collaboration Among Faculty, Students, Librarians, and Archivists” on August 20 at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Cleveland, Ohio.

The team was composed of Oberlin College Archivist Ken Grossi, The Five Colleges of Ohio Mellon Digital Scholar Jacob Heil, Professor of History Carol Lasser, and history majors Rebecca Debus, Natalia Shevin, and Joanna Wiley.

Grossi, who helped organize the meeting, led off the session. Debus, Shevin, and Wiley, who have spent their summers researching first-wave feminism at Oberlin College, were the only undergraduate students to present at the meeting.

“The panel fit well with the meeting theme Archives Change Lives,” Lasser says. “Providing this intensive experience in the Oberlin College Archives for these three students has helped them think more deeply about ‘the pastness of the past’ and the ‘presentness of the past,’ as well as about how humans change the world around them and changed by it but not always in ways that are easy to understand.”

Professor of Music Education Joanne Erwin conducted an orchestra on August 17 in the Balboa Theater in Panama City, Panama. The orchestra was composed of alumni of the Oberlin-Panama winter-term project and Panamanian alumni of the project camp. “It was an exhilarating time of renewing old friendships and making music with great passion,” Erwin says of the experience.

Tim Scholl, professor of Russian and comparative literature, has been appointed director of the Oberlin Center for Languages and Cultures (OCLC), effective July 1, 2015.

Under Sebastiaan Faber’s leadership, the OCLC was instrumental in creating greater synergies among departments and divisions of the college. Scholl hopes that the OCLC will remain as successful in fostering those collaborations and looks forward to exploring new possibilities for international study during winter term and with the Office of Study Away.

Vice President and Dean of Students Eric Estes was recently voted chair-elect of the steering board for the Consortium on High Achievement and Success, the oldest and largest national organization dedicated to the academic success of students of color at liberal arts colleges. Estes has been a member of the steering board since 2011. After serving a year as chair-elect, he will serve a three-year term as chair.

Elizabeth Hamilton, associate professor and chair of the German Language and Literatures Department, was interviewed for the Märkische Online Zeitung. The article (in German) describes Hamilton’s on-site research at the Samariteranstalten, a cluster of homes and schools for people with cognitive disabilities in Fürstenwalde, Brandenburg. Hamilton is translating and writing a scholarly edition of a photo-essay collection that was created there, Was für eine Insel in was für einem Meer.

The original work, created in the former East Germany in 1985, depicts residents of an institution for people with cognitive disabilities in astonishingly beautiful black-and-white photographs by then up-and-coming photographer Dietmar Riemann and in probing, poignant essays by the esteemed literary author Franz Fühmann. The subjects of their photographs and texts lived in care of the Samaritans’ Institution, or Samariteranstalt Fürstenwalde, a Protestant Church-run institution about 35 miles east of Berlin. The artistic value of the Fühmann-Riemann collection transcends the geographical and historical context of the now-defunct GDR. These are intimate and respectful portraits of people who in most cultures, even today, remain hidden from public view. As fuller, global histories of disability are now being written, Fühmann and Riemann’s work opens an essential window onto a formerly shuttered world.

At the end of May, Ann Cooper Albright, professor of dance and chair of the dance department, taught a weeklong intensive at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD) in Salzburg, Austria. While in Austria, she also gave an invited lecture at the University of Salzburg.

Following these ventures, Albright produced the international dance studies conference Cut & Paste: Dance Advocacy in the Age of Austerity. Held in Athens, Greece, the annual conference is a joint effort between the organizations Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) and Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), the latter of which Albright is president.

The 2015 conference panels addressed issues surrounding dance advocacy on local and global levels and also put dance advocacy into practice by supporting a dance community that has been hit especially hard by the global financial crisis. By going to Athens at this particular historical moment, international dance scholars supported their colleagues in Greece, giving them an opportunity to participate in a multifaceted dance studies conference without having to travel abroad. In addition to a scholarly conference, there were free dance classes offered and curated performances by Greek companies. Scholars also donated more than 100 books to seed the first international dance research collection in Greece.

An article coauthored by Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies and chair of Latin American studies, and Bécquer Seguín was published in the Nation. Read the article, “Why the Spanish Government Opposes Debt Relief for Greece”.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies Meredith Gadsby was interviewed by the BBC for a documentary on author Toni Morrison. In the interview, Gadsby relays the tragic story of Lee Howard Dobbins, a 4-year-old fugitive slave who died after he made the journey to Oberlin, and explains the inspiration for Morrison's Bench the Road project. Gadsby is the faculty liaison for the Toni Morrison Society. The clip can be viewed here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02x4clm

Professor of History Carol Lasser was elected president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), an organization of about 1000 people, during the annual meeting on July 18.

Established in 1977, SHEAR is an association of scholars dedicated to exploring the events and the meaning of United States history between 1776 and 1861. SHEAR’s mission is to foster the study of the early republican period among professional historians, students, and the general public. It upholds the highest intellectual standards of the historical profession and encourages the broad diffusion of historical insights through all appropriate channels, including schools, museums, libraries, electronic media, public programming, archives, and publications.

Lasser has attended SHEAR conferences since 1983, and has served on the Conference Planning Committeee, the Advisory Council, and the Editorial Board of SHEAR's journal, The Journal of the Early Republic. She will be inaugurated as president at the next meeting in July 2016.

Renee Romano, professor of history, comparative American studies, and Africana studies, gave the opening plenary address at the Southern Association of Women Historians Conference, which was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. Her address, “The Limits of Commemoration: Civil Rights Memory and the Enduring Challenge of Innocence,” explored the seeming disjuncture between the extensive commemoration of the civil rights movement and our contemporary moment of pervasive inequality and racial violence.