Faculty and Staff Notes

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.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Travis Wilson is the recipient of the 2014 American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in the field of Human Development. The award goes to the most outstanding publication in the field of human development stemming from a doctoral dissertation. Wilson’s paper was co-authored by Dr. Philip C. Rodkin (deceased) and was published in the 2013 volume of Child Development, the flagship journal of the Society for Research in Child Development:

Wilson, T.M., & Rodkin, P. C. (2013). Children’s cross-ethnic relations in contemporary elementary schools: Concurrent and prospective associations between ethnic segregation and social status. Child Development, 84, 1081-1097.

Renee Romano, professor of history, comparative American studies, and africana studies, has published a new book with Harvard University Press. “Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders” examines the phenomenon of the reopening and contemporary prosecutions of civil rights era killings.

In the 1950s and 1960s, few whites who turned to violence to try to impede the struggle for black civil rights were even charged with the murders they committed in the effort to uphold white supremacy. But in recent decades, state and federal authorities—often facing intense lobbying from families of victims—have reopened cold cases and tried now-elderly men in many of the most infamous racially motivated murders of the civil rights era. Drawing on sources ranging from trial transcripts to made-for-TV movies, Romano explores the political pressures and cultural developments that drove the legal system to revisit these decades-old murders, what happened in the courtroom when cases came before a jury, how trials have been represented in popular culture, and how different groups—from progressive activists to conservative politicians—have sought to use contemporary prosecutions to further their political agendas.

In addition, she recently gave a talk about the book at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, as well as giving a paper entitled “Historical Memory and the Contemporary Prosecution of Civil Rights-Era Crimes” at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Wendy Kozol’s new book, “Visible Wars and the Ambivalences of Witnessing,” was published by the University of Minnesota Press in fall 2014. This study brings a new perspective to enduring concerns about the efficacy of conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy. In the 21st century, visuality has been a pivotal technology in U.S. militarism, as well as in critiques of the nation at war. This book analyzes both mainstream media and alternative visual projects to understand how representations of the U.S. at war navigate in, through, and around national security logics. Visual witnessing, she argues, often remains bound up in national security agendas even as it may stretch beyond those agendas into other terrains of possibility.

For the past two years, Wendy has also been working with a former student, Rebecca Adelman (OC ’01) on a new project titled “The War In Between.” Their first publication appeared this fall: “Banality: Discordant Affects and the Ethics of Spectatorship.” Theory & Event, vol. 17, issue 3 (2014).

Wendy also published two other articles this fall: “Witnessing Genocide and the Challenges of Ethical Spectatorship,” Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, eds. S. Brophy and J. Hladki (U Toronto P); and “Witnessing Precarity: Photojournalism, Women’s/Human/Rights, and the War in Afghanistan,” in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (I.B. Tauris).

This fall, Sarah Hamill co-organized with Megan Luke (University of Southern California) a two-day, two-venue symposium co-sponsored by the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The symposium, titled Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction, explored how photographs operate as pictorial tools for the writing of art history and shape the reception of sculpture. Invited speakers were drawn from across fields in the disciplines of film studies, anthropology, and art and architectural history.

http://www.clarkart.edu/rap/RAP-Events/Event-302

http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/events/object_reproduction/index.html

Assistant Professor of Psychology Travis Wilson has published an article in the journal “Developmental Psychology”:

Wilson, T.M., Rodkin, P. C., & Ryan, A. M. (2014). The company they keep and avoid: Social goal orientation as a predictor of children’s ethnic segregation. Developmental Psychology, 50, 1116-1124.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Travis Wilson has been awarded a grant of $50,000 from the Spencer Foundation for his project titled, 'A Longitudinal Study of School-based Relationships, Academic Motivation, and School Outcomes among Low-income African-American Youth.' Wilson is examining developmental change and within-group variability among low-income African-American elementary school children in their academic motivation and relationships with peers and teachers at school.

Holly Handman-Lopez, visiting assistant professor of dance, performed with poet Esther Dischereit in Konstanz and Isny on April 3rd and 4th. The performance, “Flowers for Othello,” was based on Dischereit's latest book of poems. The poems focus on the current case, in Germany, of a neo-nazi group accused of a series of anti-immigrant murders.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Cynthia Taylor recently published an article in the journal "Computer Science Education." The full citation is: C. Taylor, D. Zingaro, L. Porter, K. Webb, C. Lee, M. Clancy, Computer Science Concept Inventories: Past and Future, Computer Science Education, Volume 24, Issue 4, 2014