Faculty and Staff Notes

Visiting Assistant Professor of French Nathan H. Dize published I Am Alive, a translation of a novel by Kettly Mars. The novel tells the story of a bourgeois Haitian family as it wrestles with issues of mental illness, unconventional sexuality, and the difficulty of returning home and rediscovery following the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Shuming Chen recently published an article in ACS Catalysis, "Cyclometalated Chiral-at-Ruthenium Catalyst for Enantioselective Ring-Closing C(sp³)–H Carbene Insertion to Access Chiral Flavanones." Co-authors include Peter Choi '23 and collaborators in Marburg, Germany.

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman's monograph, Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry (Oxford UP, 2019), was identified as an “Outstanding Academic Title” by CHOICE 2021. Her co-edited collection, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now (Edinburgh UP, 2019) has gone into paperback. She recently published an article, “Beyond Beyond: Cymbeline and the Ontology of Elsewhere,” in English Literary Renaissance 52.3. Along with Jen Waldron, she was guest editor of a special issue of that journal, Theorizing Early Modern Fictions. Finally, an article called “Patterns, The Shakespearean Sonnet, and Conduits of Scale” appeared in Spenser Studies 36 (June 2022). 

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager's review of A Continent Erupts: Decolonization, Civil War, and Massacre in Postwar Asia, 1945-1955 (Norton, 2022) by Ronald H. Spector was published in the New York Times.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Cynthia Taylor published an interview with Helen Hu on the propagation of Process Oriented Inquiry Learning (POGIL) in Computer Science, in ACM Inroads magazine.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder received an NSF RUI grant of $229,027 to fund her research program understanding galaxies in the nearby universe. This grant was also announced by Senator Sherrod Brown as one of seven grants coming to Northeast Ohio higher-education institutions.

Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino published a piece on Co-op City, a cooperative in the Bronx, and its lessons for affordable housing policy makers and advocates in the Made by History section of the Washington Post. The Post article draws upon her recent book, Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York (Cornell UP, 2022).

Assistant Professor of Politics and Comparative American Studies Jenny Garcia published a coauthored article, "The Empowering Effects of Racial Messaging: The Link Between Racial Outreach, Descriptive Representation and Black Political Mobilization," in Political Communications.

Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of German Elizabeth Hamilton published a translation and literary-historical interpretation of Franz Fühmann and Dietmar Riemann's Was für eine Insel in was für einem Meer in an open-access digital edition with Lever Press: What Kind of Island in What Kind of Sea. First published in East Germany in 1986, the original work depicts residents of the Samariteranstalten, a church-run institution for people with cognitive disabilities, in astonishing black-and-white photographs by Riemann and in probing, poignant writing by Fühmann.

Hamilton's book was reviewed by Michele Ricci-Bell in Reading in Translation, a journal edited by Stiliana Milkova, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature. The review appears here.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, Anna Lordan, was awarded the Theodosius and Irene Senkowsky Prize for Achievement in Ukrainian Studies at Harvard University's Ukranian Summer Institute.