Faculty and Staff Notes

A Chicago Reporter article about junior ROTC programs in the Chicago public schools features an interview with Gina Pérez,the Eric and Jane Nord Associate Professor of Comparative American Studies. The article, “In Chicago schools’ Junior ROTC programs, some see a troubling trend”, notes that “Ninety-three percent of Chicago junior reserve cadets are African American or Hispanic, ... and more than 70 percent of junior reserve programs are offered in high schools located in majority-black or majority-Latino ZIP codes ....” Pérez told reporter Matthew Kovac that part of the program’s popularity in those segments of the population can be attributed to the fact that they allow “... working-class and minority youth an opportunity to dispel negative stereotypes and avoid profiling by associating themselves with one of the country’s most venerated.” Read the article.

A paper by Associate Professor of Economics Ron Cheung and two coauthors, “Do homeowners associations mitigate or aggravate negative spillovers from neighboring homeowner distress?”, was recently published in the Journal of Housing Economics.

Three poems from Sky Ward, Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Comparative Literature Kazim Ali’s newest poetry collection, were featured in THEthe Poetry’s Poem(s) of the Week section in December 2013. The poetics blog also featured an interview with Ali conducted by Jorge Rodriguez-Miralles. During January, Ali is the featured blogger on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jason D. Haugen and Miriam Rothenberg ’12 recently presented their joint research at the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) annual meeting in Minneapolis. Their paper, “Allomorphy in the Classical Nahuatl ‘Nonactive,’” investigates the nature of verb-stem and affix alternations in Classical Nahuatl passive and impersonal constructions. This work extends research that began when Rothenberg was a research assistant for Haugen at Oberlin. Haugen also copresented a second paper, “Base-dependent reduplication and learnability,” with coauthor Adam Ussishkin, associate professor in the University of Arizona’s Department of Linguistics, at the annual meeting of the SSILA’s sister society, the Linguistic Society of America, at the same conference

Foreign Affairs magazine has chosen Associate Professor Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s newest book, Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea, as one of three of the most important books on Asia reviewed during the last year. The books were selected by Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. The other titles are David Shambaugh's China Goes Global: The Partial Power and Sumantra Bose’s Transforming India: Challenges to the World’s Largest Democracy. .