Faculty and Staff Notes

Oberlin voice professor and soprano Kendra Colton '83 has sung the music of John Harbison for some 25 years, including her 2020 album Late Air (Oberlin Music label) that includes music representing three decades of his writing. The two reunited for recent world premieres of Harbison's 2022 song cycle Winter Journey, based on three poems from Louise Glück’s recent collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective. Written in two different formats—one for voice with piano and another for voice with small ensemble—Colton performed the first version at the Token Creek Chamber Music Festival in September 2022 with pianist Kayo Iwama '83. The second version was created for the 50th anniversary season of Boston's Collage New Music ensemble and was performed in October at Elizabeth Parks Killian Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

View the MIT performance.

Professor of Theater and Department Chair Matthew Wright was awarded "Best Actor - Musical" by the Cleveland Critics Circle for his role as Nostradamus in Something Rotten at Beck Center for the Arts and is featured in the Cleveland Scene article announcing the 2022 winners.

Professor Peter Takács's 11-CD set of the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas was voted Album of the Year 2022 in the Solo Instrumentalist category by subscribers to the high-resolution streaming platform NativeDSD.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics Shinkyu Lee's article titled “The Political vs. the Theological: The Scope of Secularity in Arendtian Forgiveness” was recently published in the Journal of Religious Ethics.

Alicia Smith-Tran's article recently published in Sociological Perspectives titled, "'There’s the Black Woman Thing, and There’s the Age Thing': Professional Black Women on the Downsides of 'Black Don’t Crack' and Strategies for Confronting Ageism at Work."

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde wrote about her "Year in Reading" for The Millions. 

Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Matt Elrod recently published an article in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry, "Kinetics Study of Acid-Catalyzed Sulfate Esterification Reactions for Atmospherically Relevant Polyols". The coauthors on this paper are Aziz Mohammed ’23 and Sunniva Sheffield ’22.

Shari Rabin published “‘Jews, Heathens, and Other Dissenters’: Governing Religion in the English Atlantic World, 1614-1790” in the journal Jewish Social Studies.

Amy Berg was interviewed by a journalist at the magazine 1843 (a sister publication of The Economist) about the recent implosion of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and the resulting fallout for the effective altruism movement.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Chanda Feldman read as part of the WBUR and CitySpace hybrid celebration of 50 years of AGNI literary journal on Friday, November 4, 2022. Additionally, Chanda Feldman has published two new poems, "For the picnic in the sculpture garden" and "Shuk", in AGNI Issue 96.