Faculty and Staff Notes

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature Polina Dimova recently published two articles on modernist literature, music, and visual art. Her “Decadent Senses: The Dissemination of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé Across the Arts” came out in the Ashgate interdisciplinary opera collection Performing Salome, Revealing Stories, and her piece on Aleksandr Skriabin and Viacheslav Ivanov, “The Apocalyptic Dispersion of Light Into Poetry and Music,” appeared in the Academic Studies Press volume Shapes of Apocalypse: Arts and Philosophy in Russian Thought. Dimova organized the roundtable “Revolutionizing Music and Sound: Music, Technology, New Media in Russia and Eastern Europe” at the 2013 Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) in Boston, where she presented on Bulgakov’s telephones, patephones, and radio. She was also invited to give two concert previews on Russian music, “The Sacred and the Diabolical,” during the Cleveland Orchestra 2013-2014 season.

Claire Solomon, Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies, has published a book, titled Fictions of the Bad Life: The Naturalist Prostitute and Her Avatars in Latin American Literature, 1880–2010 (Ohio State UP, 2014).

The book first examines how legal, medical, and philosophical thought converged in Naturalist literature of prostitution during the consolidation of the modern Latin American states. It then traces the persistence of styles, themes, and stereotypes about women, sex, ethnicity, and race in the twentieth and twenty-first century literature to illustrate how at very different moments—the turn of the twentieth century, the 1920s–30s, and finally the turn of the twenty-first century—the past is rewritten to accommodate contemporary desires for historical belonging and national identity, even as these efforts inevitably re-inscribe aspects of the colonial history they are trying to change.

Crystal Biruk organized and co-led a Mellon/AALAC sponsored workshop on teaching African Studies at small liberal colleges at Swarthmore College in May 2014. In June 2014, she presented a paper titled "The politics of voluntarism in survey research in Malawi" at the Social Science Conference at the University of Malawi.

Professor of Mathematics Robert Bosch '85, coordinated the Bridges Short Movie Festival in Seoul, Korea. Bridges is an annual conference that focuses on connections between art and mathematics. Sixteen movies were shown, including a hand- and computer-animated film by Rachael Schwartz '17. Leah Wood '16 was the festival's video editor.

Bosch also presented two papers coauthored by students: "Figurative Mosaics from Flexible Truchet Tiles," with Urchin Colley '13, and "Game-of-Life Mosaics," with Julia Olivieri '16.

Conservatory Librarian Deborah Campana presented the paper, “From the Virtual to the Sublime: special collections come to the Oberlin Conservatory Library,” at the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, IAML ANTWERP 2014, held at the Royal Conservatoire, Antwerp, Belgium, deSingel International Arts Campus on July 15.

Catherine Oertel presented a lecture at the Gordon Research Conference on Solid State Chemistry in New London, NH. Entitled "Inspired by Corrosion: Synthesis and Crystal Chemistry of Lead Oxide Carboxylates," it reported on studies of corrosion of lead-based cultural objects such as organ pipes and detailed structural analysis of the corrosion products that form. She conducted this research with undergraduate coworkers including Elaine Liu '14, Izumi Yamakawa '14, Shiva Mandala '15, and Calvin Gang '17.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jiyul Kim published a chapter on "United Nations Command and Korean Augmentation" in the Ashgate Research Companion to the Korean War (James Matray & Donald Boose, eds).

Assistant Professor of Cynthia Taylor published a paper entitled "Leveraging Open Source Principles for Flexible Concept Inventory Development" in the Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. She gave a presentation on the work at the conference.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Jiyul Kim published an article entitled "Strategic Culture of the Republic of Korea" in the journal Contemporary Security Policy. The article explores the interaction between Korean foreign policy and Korean culture, a subject that he has taught for the last three years at Oberlin.

Assistant Professor of Classics Christopher Trinacty recently published his first book, Senecan Tragedy and the Reception of Augustan Poetry, about the relationship between Seneca's dramatic poetry and the poetry of the previous generation with the Oxford University Press.  He also presented a paper entitled "Tragic Translatio and Allusive Aemulatio in Senecan Drama" at the 8th Trends in Classics International Conference in Thessaloniki, Greece.