Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of French Matthew Senior gave an invited talk, “1671: The Zoomorphic Face in Charles Le Brun,” at an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, April 11-12. Entitled “About Faces,” the conference examined philosophical theories of the face as well the history of the face in film, literature, physiognomy, portraiture, surveillance, and plastic surgery.

Associate Professor of Psychology Cindy Frantz and Professor of Psychology Stephen Mayer published an article entitled “The Emergence of Climate Change.” The article appears in the Journal of Social Issues, a publication of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. It explores the psychology behind the disparities between the scientific consensus on climate change and people’s willingness to recognize and respond to it.

Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling recently was in Bergen, Norway, to work with a consortium of European and African prevention researchers. Darling was invited to serve as a scientific advisor to Prepare, a European Union funded program to prevent HIV and sexual risk behaviors in adolescents. The program has fielded prevention efforts in Limpopo and Capetown, South Africa, Dar Salaam, Tanzania, and Kampala, Uganda. It includes researchers from each of those countries, as well as a team of European researchers from the Netherlands, Norway, and the UK. Pilot programs developed by Prepare have involved more than 5,000 adolescents as well as teachers and parents. The Kampala program is aimed at increasing knowledge of sexuality and safe sex practices and fostering positive parent-adolescent communication around physical safety and sexuality. The theoretical basis for this research is rooted in Darling's work in the US, Philippines, and Chile.

Associate Professor of Politics Michael Parkin recently coauthored an article, “The Voting Rights Act and Latino Registration: Symbolic Assistance for English-Speaking Latinos,” which appears in The Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences. The paper shows that VRA provisions motivate English-speaking Latinos to register while having minimal impact on the registration intentions of Latinos who do not speak English. This suggests that the positive effects of VRA coverage are due to a “welcoming” symbolic effect, rather than substantial reductions in administrative barriers to registration.

Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics Sonia Kruks recently published a paper entitled “Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason: The Material Mediations of Age as Lived Experience.” The paper appeared in the volume Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, edited by Sylvia Stoller and published by De Gruyter.

On April 18 Kruks presented another paper, “Idealism, Realism, Failure: Simone de Beauvoir and Political Philosophy” to the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Comparative American Studies Afia Ofori-Mensa was featured on New Hampshire Public Radio's "Word of Mouth" segment, speaking about a class she teaches at Oberlin entitled "How To Win a Beauty Pageant." She explained how the class explores representation and identity in pageants as a way of understanding changes in national culture.

Associate Professor of Economics Ron Cheung has published an article entitled "How Are Home Owners Associations Capitalized Into Property Values" in the journal Regional Science and Urban Economics. Co-authored with Rachel Meltzer, an associate professor of urban policy at The New School, it explores the affect of homeowners' associations on property values.

Kirk Ormand, Professor of Classics, has just published a book with Cambridge University Press, titled The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece. The book deals with an archaic Greek poem (mid 6th c. BCE), known in antiquity as the Catalogue of Women, which now exists only in fragments: we have roughly 1400 lines and partial lines of a work that was probably 4000 lines long in its original form. Ormand's book, the first monograph on the Catalogue in nearly 30 years, reads the poem as an aristocratic response to the emerging structures of the polis (city-state) towards the end of the Archaic period.

Sonia Kruks, Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics recently published a paper titled “Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age and Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason: The Material Mediations of Age as Lived Experience.”
The paper appeared in the volume Simone de Beauvoir’s Philosophy of Age, ed. Sylvia Stoller. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.

On April 18, Kruks presented a paper, “Idealism, Realism, Failure: Simone de Beauvoir and Political Philosophy” to the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University.

Lynn Powell, Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, has received a 2014 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for her recent poetry. The $5,000 OAC Individual Excellence Awards are "recognition of creative artists for the exceptional merit of a body of their work that advances or exemplifies the discipline and the larger artistic community. These awards support artists' growth and development and recognize their work in Ohio and beyond." This is the fourth OAC Excellence Award Powell has received: three for poetry and one for nonfiction.