Faculty and Staff Notes

On October 19, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered his paper "Renaming the Fetish: Assembling Bolsas de Mandinga" at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Rarey's invited talk was part of the Clark's 2023 conference, "The Fetish A(r)t Work: African Objects in the Making of European Art History, 1500-1900," which examined the making and “invention” of African art in European discourse.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Pallavi Wakharkar published a new short story, entitled "On Live," in the autumn 2023 issue of The Southern Review.

Wakharkar's short story "Simple Animal," published in December 2023 in The Iowa Review, was recently noted as a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2023, edited by Min Jin Lee.

Cortney Smith's essay "The Suspense Novel as Persuasion: Survivance and Subversion in Louise Erdrich's The Round House" was recently published in Studies in American Indian Literatures.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder gave the University of Louisville's annual Bullitt Lecture on October 12. The Bullitt Lecture is an invited speaker series aimed at engaging the general public in astronomy. Professor Scudder spoke about her new book, The Milky Way Smells of Rum & Raspberries.

Lecturer in German and Russian Olesya Ivantsova organized a panel called “Reproductive Tales” at the German Studies Association Annual Conference in Montréal (October 5-8, 2023) and presented her paper “Narrating the Pain: Stories of Childbirth and Abortion in East Germany” discussing works of GDR writers Irmtraud Morgner and Maja Wiens.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Rachel Saylor has published an article, "To Fluoresce or Not to Fluoresce: Investigation of Structural and Fluorescence Characteristics of CBI-Dopamine, CBI-Serotonin, and Their Structural Analogs" in Analytical Chemistry. Her coauthor is Elizabeth Rigby ’22.

Emeritus Professor of English Robert Pierce's article "Does Shakespeare Believe in Sudden Conversion for his Villains?" published in Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference, Vol. 13, Article 6.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Anna Lordan gave a talk on the dynamics of attention in the film The Earth is Blue as an Orange by Ukrainian film director and poet Iryna Tsilyk at the Dmytro Shtohryn International Ukrainian Studies Conference, held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 5-7.

Assistant Professor Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers has published a long essay, "Ear Training," in the newest issue of West Branch. Among other subjects, the essay describes working with musical legend Meredith Monk when Rogers was a student at Oberlin in Rian Brown-Orso's Collaborations course in 2005, where Associate Professor Ross Karre was also a student. This essay will appear in Rogers's new essay collection, Miss Southeast, out from Northwestern University Press in 2024.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand has been elected to the post of President of the Society for Classical Studies, the largest professional organization in North American for the study of the ancient Mediterranean world.  The SCS has approximately 2,800 members, and is dedicated to the study of the literature, history, archaeology, politics, religion, art, philosophy, and cultures of “classical” Greece and Rome, as well as their interaction with the other cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.

Professor Ormand will serve a three-year term: in January of 2024 he will become President-Elect; in January of 2025 he will assume the role of President; and in January 2026 he will serve as immediate Past-President.  Among his duties Professor Ormand will organize a Presidential Panel and deliver the Presidential Address at the January 2026 meeting of the SCS.

Professor Ormand is the first member of the Oberlin faculty to be elected to the position of SCS President, and is the second professor from a small liberal-arts College to be elected in the last 50 years.