Faculty and Staff Notes

Jody L. Kerchner, Professor of Music Education and Director of the PACE Division, was re-elected to her second term (2020-22) as Board Member of the International Society for Music Education (ISME).

Len Podis, Emeritus Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, published the essay "Literary Lions: Chinua Achebe and Ongoing Dialogues in Modern African Literature" in the journal Research in African Literatures. 

Professor Podis dedicated the piece to the memory of his longtime colleague, co-teacher, and coauthor, Yakubu Saaka, Professor of Africana Studies, who passed away in 2008.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Matthew Berkman’s dissertation won an award from the American Political Science Association. Berkman’s dissertation, "Coercive Consensus: Jewish Federations, Ethnic Representation, and the Roots of American Pro-Israel Politics" is the winner of the association’s Walter Dean Burnham Dissertation Prize. “Coercive Consensus” sets out to answer the question of how complete identification with the state of Israel came to characterize every major national Jewish organization in the highly consequential period following the Six Day War.  

Professor of Musicology Charles McGuire presented the paper, "Patti vs. Butt on the British Stage, or the Legacy of an Operatic Star versus a Festival Star” at the biennial conference of the North American British Music Studies Association.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway published "Figure (of Personhood) Drawing: Scaffolding Signing and Signers in Nepal" in Signs and Society.

Professor of Japanese Ann Sherif organized the digital exhibit “Popular Protest in Postwar Japan: The Antiwar Art of Shikoku Gorō” in collaboration with Maxwell Mitchell ’20 and Oberlin College Libraries staff Megan Mitchell and Cecilia Robinson.  The exhibit situates the art of Hiroshima native Shikoku Gorō in the context of antiwar, antinuclear, and social justice movements from 1945 to 2020. Structured around three books (Atom Bomb Poems, The Angry Jizo, and Hiroshima Sketches), the site guides visitors through the diverse art that Shikoku, in collaboration with grassroots networks of artists and writers, created to promote social justice. It includes guerilla art protesting the Korean War, poems against the nuclear arms race, a children’s book about war, cityscapes critiquing Hiroshima’s wartime past, and recent performing arts that trace this activist history. “Popular Protest” was supported by a Mellon Foundation Digital Humanities grant. It is suitable for general audiences and for courses in history, Asian studies, art, politics, and peace studies.

Professor of Mathematics Robert Bosch ‘85 coedited the Proceedings of the Bridges 2020 Conference, which was supposed to be held in Helsinki, Finland, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic took place virtually. The proceedings included a paper by Bosch and Aaron Kreiner ‘19 on "Domino Steganography" and a paper by Kreiner on "Checkerboard Quadrilateral Mosaics." 

Chris Jenkins, associate dean for academic support, wrote the piece “Race and Racialized Aesthetics in Conservatory Education,” which was featured in Spark, the online magazine of the National Center for Institutional Diversity. 

Assistant Professor of Economics Evan Kresch presented a paper, "Another Seat at the Table: Municipal Council Size and Local Taxes in Brazil," on July 23 at the Virtual LAC Development Seminar .

Professor Kresch also presented "The Story of a Hurricane: Local Government, NGOs, and Post-Disaster Assistance" on July 28 at the 2020 Bolivian Conference on Development Economics.

Professor of Physics Yumi Ijiri and her summer research students, Emily Everhart '22 and Aidan Khelil '22, recently participated in the virtual American Conference on Neutron Scattering, contributing a presentation titled, "Probing intraparticle and interparticle magnetic structures in chemically homogeneous manganese ferrite nanoparticle assemblies."