Faculty and Staff Notes

Ellis Tallman, Danforth-Lewis Professor of Economics and department chair, organized a program on “Financial Crises Past and Present” on October 25 at Indiana University. Tallman participated in a panel discussion about “What Ends Banking Panics?”

Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies Renee Romano spoke with host John Hockenberry about her new book, Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders (Harvard University Press) on the National Public Radio program The Takeaway on Wednesday, October 15. Racial Reckoning explores the reopenings and recent prosecutions of unresolved murder cases from the civil rights era, such as the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and the 1964 murders of Freedom Summer activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. On The Takeaway, Romano discussed what these murders reveal about America's racial past and what the contemporary trials illustrate about racial politics today.

Shulamit Magnus’ new book, the second volume of Pauline Wengeroff's Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, has been published by Stanford University Press (a copy will be on display in Mudd in Recent Faculty Publications, as well as available in the stacks). The volume has won the Hadassah-Brandeis Translation Award. Volume One of this work won the National Jewish Book Award.

In these remarkable memoirs, Wengeroff refracts the cultural transformation of Russian Jewry, then the world's largest Jewish community, through the experience of families and women. Magnus' edition is an unabridged, original translation, with extensive Introductions, Notes, and Commentary that treat the work's historical context and significance and make it accessible to a lay as well as a scholarly audience.

Alberto Zambenedetti, visiting assistant professor of cinema studies and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, published the edited volume World Film Locations: Florence with Intellect Books. The series, which is distributed in North America by the University of Chicago Press, explores and reveals the relationship between the city and cinema around the globe. Each volume is devoted to a specific urban environment and its representation on film, following the symbiotic relationship between the rise of filmmaking as an artistic and social practice and urbanization on a global scale. By focusing on cinema and architecture as mutually illuminating arts, the World Film Locations series helps the reader navigate the different permutations of a “Global Cinematic City.” Containing essays and scene descriptions written by leading scholars in the field, the books are illustrated throughout with evocative movie stills, city maps, and location photographs that allow the reader to virtually tour many cities of the world. Available in print or as e-book, the Florence installment will be launched officially at the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto on October 22, 2014.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jiyul Kim gave a presentation on the strategic culture of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) on October 16 at a East-West Center in Washington conference on "Asian Responses to Perceptions of Asia-Pacific Strategic Cultures." The conference critically considered essays on Asia-Pacific strategic cultures published in a special issue of the journal Contemporary Security Policy (Vol. 35, No. 2 Jul 2014).

Visiting Assistant Professor of history Jiyul Kim gave lectures on pre-modern and modern Korean history to K-12 teachers from the greater Boston area at the annual Korean Studies Workshop October 10-11. Organized by University of Massachusetts at Lowell, the purpose of the three-day workshop was to provide professional education to teachers to help them incorporate Korean subject matter into their curriculum.

Associate Professor of Politics Michael Parkin recently published a book titled Talk Show Campaigns: Presidential Candidates on Daytime and Late Night Television. The book explores the history and impact of candidate appearances on entertainment talk shows like The Tonight Show, The Daily Show, and The View. Parkin uses extensive data to show that these interviews are much more than a gimmick--they are a key part of how candidates communicate with voters. As such, they reveal a lot about how campaigns have changed over the past two decades.

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.