Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager gave a talk at the Korean War 64th Anniversary International Academic Seminar held at Daegu, South Korea on September 24. The event was sponsored by Yeongnam University's Institute of Korean Unification and the Korean Army Academy at Yeongchon. Under the theme of “Beyond the Korean War and toward unification” the conference examined paths toward Korean unification. Professor Jager's talk, based on her recent book Brothers At War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, provided the historical context. She is in Korea for the 2014-15 academic year under a Fulbright grant to research her next book on the history of Great Power rivalry over Northeast Asia at the end of the 19th century.

Ellis Tallman, Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics, is cited in the September 20 print edition of The Economist.

During the summer, Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics Sonia Kruks presented at three conferences and had a paper published.

In June she was the respondent in an “Author Meets Readers Session” that discussed her recent book, Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity, at the “Diverse Lineages of Existentialism” conference held in St Louis, Missouri. In July she presented a paper, “‘Being Human’ and the Question of Gender,” at the conference “Transfusion and Transformation: The Creative Potential of Interdisciplinary Knowledge Exchange” held at the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham University, UK. In August she presented a paper, “Hannah Arendt, Gender, and Judgment,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington, DC.

In addition, her paper, “Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason: The Material Mediations of Age as Lived Experience” was published over the summer in the volume Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, edited by Sylvia Stoller and published in Berlin by De Gruyter.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature Polina Dimova recently published two articles on modernist literature, music, and visual art. Her “Decadent Senses: The Dissemination of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé Across the Arts” came out in the Ashgate interdisciplinary opera collection Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, and her piece on Aleksandr Skriabin and Viacheslav Ivanov, “The Apocalyptic Dispersion of Light Into Poetry and Music,” appeared in the Academic Studies Press volume Shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and Philosophy in Russian Thought. Dimova organized the roundtable “Revolutionizing Music and Sound: Music, Technology, New Media in Russia and Eastern Europe” at the 2013 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in Boston, where she presented on Bulgakov’s telephones, patephones, and radio. She was also invited to give two concert previews on Russian music, “The Sacred and the Diabolical,” during the Cleveland Orchestra 2013-2014 season.

Claire Solomon, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, has published a book, titled Fictions of the Bad Life: The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 (Ohio State UP, 2014).

The book first examines how legal, medical, and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution during the consolidation of the modern Latin American states. It then traces the persistence of styles, themes, and stereotypes about women, sex, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature to illustrate how at very different moments—the turn of the twentieth century, the 1920s–30s, and finally the turn of the twenty-first century—the past is rewritten to accommodate contemporary desires for historical belonging and national identity, even as these efforts inevitably re-inscribe aspects of the colonial history they are trying to change.

Crystal Biruk organized and co-led a Mellon/AALAC sponsored workshop on teaching African Studies at small liberal colleges at Swarthmore College in May 2014. In June 2014, she presented a paper titled "The politics of voluntarism in survey research in Malawi" at the Social Science Conference at the University of Malawi.

Professor of Mathematics Robert Bosch '85, coordinated the Bridges Short Movie Festival in Seoul, Korea. Bridges is an annual conference that focuses on connections between art and mathematics. Sixteen movies were shown, including a hand- and computer-animated film by Rachael Schwartz '17. Leah Wood '16 was the festival's video editor.

Bosch also presented two papers coauthored by students: "Figurative Mosaics from Flexible Truchet Tiles," with Urchin Colley '13, and "Game-of-Life Mosaics," with Julia Olivieri '16.

Conservatory Librarian Deborah Campana presented the paper, “From the Virtual to the Sublime: special collections come to the Oberlin Conservatory Library,” at the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, IAML ANTWERP 2014, held at the Royal Conservatoire, Antwerp, Belgium, deSingel International Arts Campus on July 15.

Catherine Oertel presented a lecture at the Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Chemistry in New London, NH. Entitled "Inspired by Corrosion: Synthesis and Crystal Chemistry of Lead Oxide Carboxylates," it reported on studies of corrosion of lead-based cultural objects such as organ pipes and detailed structural analysis of the corrosion products that form. She conducted this research with undergraduate coworkers including Elaine Liu '14, Izumi Yamakawa '14, Shiva Mandala '15, and Calvin Gang '17.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jiyul Kim published a chapter on "United Nations Command and Korean Augmentation" in the Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War (James Matray & Donald Boose, eds).