Faculty and Staff Notes

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.

Associate Professor of Psychology Cindy Frantz has received the 2014 Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). Her award citation made note of her classroom application of psychological theories to current social issues and her guidance of student research. The SPSSI also invited to speak at the this summer at the 2014 SPSSI Conference in a special SPSSI teaching session.

This past April 27, in New York City, Professor of Hispanic Studies Sebastiaan Faber presented the fourth Annual ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, a $100,000 prize, to Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative. Earlier in April, Prof. Faber delivered keynote addresses at CUNY’s Annual Graduate Conference for Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures & Languages, and at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in Lexington.

Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling was quoted in the Chicago Tribune article, “Creating support when you're raising kids away from family.”

Associate Professor of History and Comparative American Studies Shelley Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology Rick Baldoz, and Assistant Professor of English Harrod Suarez participated in the Association for Asian American Studies annual meeting held in San Francisco, April 16 to 19. This is the largest association for scholars of the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies.

Lee presented new research in a paper titled, “Koreagate: Race, Gender, and the Return of the Yellow Peril in 1970s America,” and participated in a state-of-the-field roundtable discussion on Asian American history. Baldoz participated in a pedagogy roundtable discussion titled, “Teaching Asian American Studies: Strategies, Trajectories, and Philosophies.” Suarez presented his research in a paper titled, “The Maternal Diaspora in Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son.”

Professor of Politics and East Asian Studies Marc Blecher attended the Conference on Governance, Adaptability and System Stability under Contemporary One-Party Rule: Comparative Perspectives at Nanchang University, in Nanchang China from March 27 to 29. He presented a paper jointly written with Daniel Zipp ’13, titled “Migrants and Mobilization: Sectoral Patterns in China, 2010-2013.”

Blecher will present a new version of the this paper as the annual keynote lecture, entitled “Migrants and Mobilization: Labor Politics and Political Stability in China”, at the University of Glasgow Confucius Institute, Glasgow, Scotland, on May 12.