Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Dean for Intercultural Engagement Josh Whitson begins term as Trainer Corps Chair Designate for NAFSA: Association of International Educators.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Shuming Chen has published an article in ACS Catalysis, "C-H Activation and Sequential Addition to Dienes and Imines: Synthesis of Amines with β-Quaternary Centers and Mechanistic Studies on the Complex Interplay Between the Catalyst and Three Reactants." Coauthors include Gabriel Negrao de Morais ’25 as well as collaborators from Yale University.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder published a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society titled "The reliability of gas-phase metallicities immediately adjacent to non-star-forming spaxels in MaNGA". This paper was in collaboration with two Oberlin student coauthors, and found that a subset of methods to estimate the chemical composition of gas in nearby galaxies are biased to high values if they are found near a region of the galaxy dominated by light coming from a source other than young stars.

Assistant Professor of Dance Al Evangelista performed in New York City’s The Tank with alum, Nikaio Thomashow ’18. Together, they debuted Echoes, Professor Evangelista’s newest dance theater work incorporating augmented reality, dance, and motion capture to explore themes of history and queerness.

Visiting Assistant Professor Katie Berta published three new poems from a manuscript in progress in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of the Colorado Review and a poem from her book, Retribution Forthcoming, in Verse Daily. Retribution Forthcoming was published by Ohio University Press in March.

On December 2, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered the Distinguished Alumni Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Art History, where he earned his PhD in 2014. Rarey's lecture, "Renaming the Fetish in the Eighteenth-Century African Atlantic," was simulcast on Zoom and is publicly available on the Department's YouTube channel.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey published his essay, "A Cartographer of the Long Eighteenth Century: Anastácio de Sant’Anna’s Guia de Caminhantes" in a special issue of Arts dedicated to “Black Artists in the Atlantic World." The essay is available open-access and under a Creative Commons license.

Caroline Val of Teen Vogue interviewed Yveline Alexis for an article about the impact of anti-Haitian rhetoric.

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutierrez Negron cofounded the small literary press La pequeña, proyecto editorial. The inaugural Fall 2024 catalog includes a memoir about Montserrat’s volcanic explosion in the 1990s written by author Yvonne Weekes; a novel by a 25 year-old Puerto Rican novelist, Daniel Rosa Hunter; and a literary travelogue by Mexican writer, Luis Felipe Lomelí. La pequeña will publish three books a year, spanning Puerto Rican, Caribbean, and Latin American literature.

Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial World Literature Asif Iqbal’s article, entitled “The East Pakistan-West Pakistan Entanglement: Gender, Politics and Postcolonial Development in Shawkat Ali’s Dhakkhinayoner Din,” has been published in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. The article grew out of the British Academy Writing Workshop “Pakistan to Bangladesh, 1947–71.”