Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of Physics Yumi Ijiri recently published the article "Particle moment canting in CoFe2O4 Nanoparticles." The article appears in the journal Physical Review B (condensed matter and materials physics) as a Rapid Communication. Kathryn Hasz '14, now a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania, is the lead author, and the work was done in collaboration with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

The article "Beyond 'Self-Congratulatory Celebration': Complicating Civil Rights Anniversaries" by Renee Romano, Professor of History, Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies, appears in the November 2014 issue of the American Historian, the new magazine of the Organization of American Historians. Romano discussed Ferguson and the Eric Garner cases on the NPR program the Takeaway December 5. She was also quoted in a December 2 New York Times article about the "Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations" oral history project at the Brooklyn Historical Society, for which she serves as a consultant.

Ellis Tallman, department chair and Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics, presented the paper "Federal Reserve System and World War I: Designing Policies without Precedent" at the International historical symposium, "Central Banks in the Great War" at the Banque de France, Paris, in November. Click here to access a PDF of the program and here to read the paper.

Oberlin College's Office of Environmental Sustainability (OES) internship program is featured in "Guide to Creating & Managing Sustainability Internship Programs," a new resource from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Bridget Flynn, Sustainability Coordinator for the Office of Environmental Sustainability (OES), contributed to the guide. 

At the November joint SDHS/CORD conference, Ann Cooper Albright, Professor of Dance and Chair of the Dance Department at Oberlin College, officially became President of the Society of Dance History Scholars, an international organization of dance scholars dedicated to furthering the field of dance studies. She is also the program chair for their next meeting (June 2015), which will focus on dance advocacy in Athens, Greece.

Ron Cheung, associate professor of Economics, along with coauthor Rachel Meltzer, has published the paper "Why and Where Do Homeowners Associations Form?" in CityScape, the policy journal published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. To download the paper, visit here.

In May, Peter Swendsen released Allusions to Seasons and Weather, a new recording on the Oberlin Music label. To create the recording, Swendsen, an associate professor of computer music and digital arts in Oberlin’s TIMARA Department, devoted a year to studying soundscape composition and ecoacoustics as a Fulbright Fellow in Oslo, Norway.

For more information on Allusions to Seasons and Weather, click here.

Sylvia Watanabe, associate professor of creative writing, was a featured reader at the Lougheed Festival of the Arts at SUNY Potsdam last May. She read from her novel-in-progress, “The Atomic History of Cassidy Bright.” An excerpt from the book, “The Lady in the Song,” has appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of the “Nashville Review,” published by Vanderbilt University.

Crystal Biruk published an article titled “‘Aid for gays:’ The moral and the material in ‘African homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi” in “The Journal of Modern African Studies.”

On September 24, 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. 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. Miyoshi Jager's talk, based on her recent book “Brothers At War: The Unending Conflict in Korea,” provided the historical context.

Miyoshi Jager is currently 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.