Faculty and Staff Notes

Assistant Professor of Music Theory Samuel Gardner was interviewed for an Ideastream story on What Makes Music Scary? Instrumentation, Composition, and Your Imagination.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions Andrew Macomber gave a talk at the 2024 Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, on October 23. His talk was titled “A Nascent Zombie Affliction in Medieval Japan: The Buddhist Ritual Response to ‘Corpse-vector Disease.’”

In a panel presentation at the annual meeting of the Midwest Music Library Association, Head of the Conservatory Library Kathleen Abromeit and Dyani Sabin ’14 offered an overview of the book they edited, Music Information Literacy: Inclusion and Advocacy, which presents concepts, theories, and cases to embrace greater inclusion in music library instruction. The book is forthcoming from Library Juice Press, expected out November 2024. Also at the meeting, STEM Librarian Eboni A. Johnson ’97 presented “Show Them Who You Are: Code-Switching and Code-Meshing in the Academy.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Helen Shears won the Parker-Schmitt Dissertation Award with the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Shears’ dissertation, “The Treaties of Utrecht and the Making of the British Empire, 1713-1783,” examines the process of treaty-making in Europe as a tool of global empire building. She was nominated for consideration by her advisor, Philip Stern at Duke University.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Danielle Godon-Decoteau and three Oberlin ’24 graduates, Sahibpreet Kaur, Yuhki Ueda, and Allison To, presented a poster at the Asian American Psychological Association's Annual Convention in Atlanta, GA entitled "A Mixed-Methods Study: Asian Americans' Racial Experiences and Understandings in the Aftermath of the COVID-19 Pandemic and 2020 BLM Racial Justice Protests."

Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies Matthew Berkman gave an invited talk at Grand Valley State University titled "A Critical History of the 'New Antisemitism' Paradigm: From the Six-Day War to 10/7."

Professor of Economics Ron Cheung recently published "All (Economic) Politics is Local: Voting Responses to Localized Price Shocks during the Great Recession" in The Journal of Regional Science. Economics major Yijia Gao ’19 provided research assistance with the data collection process.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Shuming Chen has published an article, "β3-Tryptophans by Iron-Catalyzed Enantioselective Amination of 3-Indolepropionic Acids," in Organic Letters. Her co-authors are Marisa Ih ’25 and collaborators from the University of Marburg, Germany.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Beiyi Hu's new article, "Talking about Race in a Race-Taboo Land," was selected as the feature article in Contexts. Listen to Beiyi discuss the article in this podcast here.

Assistant Professor of History Caroline Wood Newhall recently published a piece, “It Is Not the Policy nor the Interest of the South to Destroy the Negro”: Black Prisoners of War and the Intersection of Race, Property, and Law in the Confederacy,” in the edited collection Race and Gender at War: Writing American Military History with the University of Alabama Press.