Faculty and Staff Notes

Professor of Sociology Greggor Mattson won the gold medal for LGBTQ+ academic titles from the Independent Publisher Book Awards for Who Needs Gay Bars? Bar-Hopping through America's LGBTQ+ Places (Stanford 2023). He was also elected 2025-26 Chair of the Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association.

Senior Lecturer of Writing and Communication Hal Sundt wrote about tornadoes, storm chasing, and the movie Twisters for The Ringer.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Anna Lordan presented at the inaugural RUTA conference in the Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine, on exploring embodied knowledge with turn-of-the-20th-century Ukrainian writer Lesia Ukrainka, and facilitated a workshop in Lviv, Ukraine on "Writing: Becoming Our Own Mentor with students of the Invisible University," set up to support students whose studies have been impacted by the Russian invasion.

“Blue Hour,” a poem by Associate Professor of Creative Writing Chanda Feldman, was featured on The Slowdown podcast from American Public Media. Feldman’s poems “Blue Hour,” “Toured the Imperial Medieval Castle,” and “Palinode to a New Year of Trees” also appeared in issue 61 of the Harvard Review. Her poems “The Age of Discovery,” “The Dead Sea,” and “As a Side Note to a Side Note in the History” appeared in the spring 2024 issue of EPOCH literary magazine. Feldman’s poem “Demonstration” was anthologized in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.

Danforth Professor of Politics Emerita Sonia Kruks presented a paper titled "Varieties of Oppression in Beauvoir's Thinking" at the conference Simone de Beauvoir as a Moral Philosopher, held at the Free University of Berlin on June 28-29.

Assistant Professor of Politics Ali Masood recently published an article titled, "The Rule of Law in Red and Blue: Affective Polarization and Support for Legal Institutions in the United States" that examines how elite cues and affective animus impact public perceptions of the FBI, DOJ, and the U.S. Supreme Court in American Politics Research.

Lecturer of Creative Writing Amanda Hodes presented her paper "Extractive Poetics: Using Poetic Text Mining to Counter Extractivist Ideologies" at the 2024 International Digital Media and Arts Association conference hosted at Winona State University this past week.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies Meredith Gadsby participated in a panel moderated by Warren R. Harding ’12 at the 2024 Caribbean Studies Association Conference in St. Lucia June 3-7. Gadsby presented the paper “Full Moon Passion on the Dark Side of the Moon: A Sudden and Big Lust: Menopausal Multiverses and Myth Making.” This conference hosts scholars, artists, public officials, and activists to discuss matters relevant to Caribbean communities within and outside the region. Gadsby is a past president of the Association of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars, which hosted a luncheon at the conference.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies Meredith Gadsby participated in the panel “Diasporic Vision of Toni Morrison and Aimè Cèsaire” at the Toni Morrison Society’s 2024 Summer Symposium in Martinique June 22-27. It was the first in-person gathering of Morrison and Cèsaire scholars to discuss the shared vision of the African Diaspora in their works. Gadsby's paper, “The Greatest Kitchen Table Poets of All: Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Edwidge Danticat in Diasporic Dialogue,” examines Morrison's work in dialogue with that of Marshall and Danticat, exploring “kitchen table poetics” to mobilize a philosophy of Black love in resistance to Cesaire’s concept of “thingification.” Gadsby is a life member of the society and a member of its board.

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager's book (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023) The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, received the 2024 Robert L. Jervis and Paul W. Schroeder Best Book Award from the International History and Politics section of the American Political Science Association.