Faculty and Staff Notes

Over spring break, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion Shari Rabin was an invited speaker at the symposium “Beyond Christianity: Religious Identities in the Premodern Anglosphere,” hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Her talk was titled “Hath Not a Jew Religion?: Governing Difference in the English Atlantic.”

The paperback edition of The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, by Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager, has been published by Harvard University Press. The book received the 2024 Best Book Award in International History from the American Political Science Association and the 2024 Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History from the Royal United Services Institute. 

East Asian Studies Librarian Yilin La presented “The Life Cycle of a Digitization Project from a Spreadsheet to Active Learning” at the Digital Humanities and Digitization Workshop for Japanese Materials, co-hosted by the National Institute of Japanese Literature and the North American Coordinating Council of Japanese Studies. The presentation was a report on Oberlin’s 2024-2025 NIJL-NCC CDDP Digitization grant project.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Francesca Chubb-Confer delivered the lecture "Nightingales and Falcons: Iqbal, Metaphor, and the Poetic Imagination of Islamic Modernity" at McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies. Chubb-Confer also presented the paper "World Literatures, World Religions, and the Translation of Islam" at a conference of the American Comparative Literature Association.

Conservatory Librarian Krista Mitchell wrote a chapter for Beyond Zombie Politics: The Art of George A. Romero's Cinema (University Press of Mississippi, 2025). Her chapter discusses Romero's use of music and sound to create a sense of the fantastic. This book will be on library shelves soon.

Director of Intercultural Engagement Sam Yang authored two articles in conjunction with the 2026 National Association of Student Personnel Administrators Annual Conference: “Empowering API Student Success, Leadership, and Resilience Through Mentorship as Campus Infrastructure,” which examines how mentorship can strengthen belonging, leadership, and culturally responsive support; and “Burning Both Ends: A Conceptual Model for International Student Employee Burnout Prevention and Supervisory Practice in Higher Education.”

Associate Professor of Music Theory Andrew Pau published "Fauréan Correspondences: Motivic Practice and Octatonicism in Lili Boulanger's Clairières dans le ciel" in Gabriel Fauré: Influences and Influence, an essay collection edited by James William Sobaskie (Boydell Press, 2026). Pau's chapter examines intertextual correspondences between song cycles by Fauré and Boulanger.

Professor of Theater and Africana Studies Caroline Jackson Smith directed Queens Girl at Karamu House in Cleveland. The one-woman show follows the journey of a young African American woman who moves from high school in Nigeria to Bennington College from 1968 to 1972, during which she experiences powerful personal, cultural, artistic, and political awakenings.

Associate Professor of Physics & Astronomy Jillian Scudder gave a public talk for the Richland Astronomical Society at its monthly meeting on March 7. The talk focused on her recent book, The Milky Way Smells of Rum & Raspberries.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder was interviewed live on WWL radio, discussing the hunt for alien life in the universe and its practical challenges, on February 25.