Faculty and Staff Notes

Michael Fisher, Department of History chair and Robert S. Danforth professor of history, made a "video provocation" at the Tate Britain symposium "The Black Subject: Ancient to Modern" on February 21, 2015. As part of the lead-off session, "On Presence and Absence," Fisher showed how Asians in Britain participated in the production of pre-Victorian British art.

Ellis W. Tallman, economics department chair and Danforth-Lewis professor of economics, organized a session at the Western Economic Association International's 11th International Conference (January 8-11, 2015) in Wellington, New Zealand. Tallman is a member of the Western Economic Association International committee.

For details on the conference, see the program.

Christopher Trinacty, assistant professor of classics, contributed a chapter on Senecan tragedy to the recently published book The Cambridge Companion to Seneca. The chapter investigates the competing methodologies for the understanding of Senecan tragedy, with suggestions for possible ways to resolve these views.

Trinacty also recently published book reviews for the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) and the Ancient History Bulletin.

The book Wind Instrument by Kazim Ali, director of the creative writing program and associate professor of creative writing and comparative literature, is now available from Spork Press. Purchase the book on the Spork Press website.

Professor of Medieval Art History Erik Inglis recently published the article “Art as Evidence in Medieval Relic Disputes: Three Cases from Fifteenth-Century France,” in Matter of Faith: An Interdisciplinary Study of Relics and Relic Veneration in the Medieval Period, ed. James Robinson, Lloyd de Beer with Anna Harnden (London, British Museum, 2014), pp. 159-63. The article examines the way that late medieval viewers assessed the age of artifacts to determine their value as evidence.

Denise Birkhofer, Ellen Johnson ’33 curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM), has published an article entitled "'Le centre du milieu': Matta and the Exploding Dome.” The article appears in the 2014 special issue of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas dedicated to Latin American art.

The article explores Matta’s later appropriation of architectural models to facilitate his exploration of fragmented or exploding structures. It considers a group of graphic works from 1943 and 1968 based on diagrams by architects Buckminster Fuller and Bernard Kirschenbaum—including one example from the AMAM collection—as case studies of the artist’s engagement with one of the seminal structures of 20th century architecture: the geodesic dome.

Heidi Thomann Tewarson, professor emerita of German, published an article entitled, "From Terezin to Berlin: The Survivors' Return" in Literatur und Anthropologie: H.G. Adler, Elias Canetti, und Franz Baermann Steiner in London (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2014), pp. 109-137.

The bilingual volume contains essays on all three German-Jewish Intellectuals who came from Prague and Vienna and met again in London after the war. In their writing, they contributed equally to anthropology and to literature—as the title indicates—and also to poetry, philosophy, and history.

Nancy Darling, William and Jeannette Smith chair of psychology, has been appointed editor-in-chief of the Journal of Adolescence, a leading journal in developmental psychology that focuses on age-related change in the second decade of life.

The Journal is unique in its international perspective. It is operated by the Foundation for Professionals in Services to Adolescents, a UK based organization, and publishes research related in adolescent health and development from researchers in psychology, biology, sociology, epidemiology, economics, medicine, and related fields. Darling had served as an associate editor for the Journal for the past eight years.

"What's American About American Poetry," an essay by Kazim Ali, associate professor and director of creative writing, has been included in the new anthology A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. The essay is on the subject of contemporary Indigenous American writing.

Marc Blecher, professor of politics and East Asian studies, and Daniel Zipp '13, published their article entitled “Migrants and Mobilization: Sectoral Patterns in China, 2010-2013" in the Global Labour Journal (January, 2015). The article analyzes the differences in social protest among migrant workers in China’s apparel, automobile, construction, and electronics industries.

The article is based on research originally done for Zipp's honors thesis, which the pair adapted for a paper they presented at an international conference sponsored by several German and Chinese universities in Nanchang, China, in March 2014.