Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón has published the article "La disposición censoria: las dos vidas de Fernández de Lizardi y las sensibilidades conservadoras en México” (“The Censorial Disposition: The Two Lives of Fernández de Lizardi and Conservative Sensibilities in Mexico”). The article offers a new account of the life of Mexico’s first novelist, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776-1827), and explores structurally conservative aspects and uses of the 19th century novel.

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager was cited and quoted by Korea JoongAng Daily in "Incheon landing was turning point for war, nation and world," a story marking the 73rd anniversary of the Inchon landing in the Korean War (September 15). Professor Jager is the author of Brothers At War: The Unending Conflict in Korea (Norton, 2013).

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand has published a new article, "Did (Imaginary) Cinaedi Have Sex with Women?" in a volume of collected essays, Searching for the Cinaedus in Ancient Rome, eds. Tommaso Gazzari and Jesse Weiner (Brill Press, 2023). Ormand's chapter argues that although the Romans assumed normal men could be interested in homoerotic as well as heteroerotic encounters, one defining feature of the cinaedus was an exclusive preference for homoerotic sex. It argues further that this assumption operates independently of the use of cinaedus as a reproach for men who are not, in fact, thought to be cinaedi.

In July, a book by Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard V. Smith, French Colonialism from the Ancien Régime to the Present, was published in the New Approaches to European History series by Cambridge University Press. It is dedicated to the Oberlin students who took History 282, the course on which the book is based.

Alicia Smith-Tran was an invited panelist at a session on inclusive teaching practices at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in Philadelphia.

A translation of a poem by contemporary Ukrainian poet Oleksandr Kocharyan by Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Anna Lordan was shortlisted for the Ukrainian Institute London's Translation Prize and published in a special edition of the London Ukrainian Review dedicated to Victoria Amelina.

Joshua Davidson just published a paper in Sustainable Cities and Society titled "A Socio-Spatial Approach to Define Priority Areas for Bicycle Infrastructure Using Covid-19 Data" that develops new methodologies to more equitably plan bicycle infrastructure. The article will appear in a special issue on the "People-Environment-Infrastructure Relationship in Future Cities."

Associated Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón’s book, Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence, was published in June by Vanderbilt University Press. Mexico, Interrupted studies the post-independence elite’s obsession with the labor and idleness of the population between in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. 

Assistant Professor of Dance Al Evangelista is one of three dance artists whose work is being supported in 2023 through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to the National Center for Choreography at the University of Akron. Evangelista's project, developed in partnership with Daring Dances (Ann Arbor, MI), is part of NCCAkron's Dancing Labs residency program.

Associate Professor Ellen Wurtzel published an article in the August 2023 issue of French Historical Studies, entitled "Passionate Encounters, Public Healing. Medieval Urban Bathhouses in Northern France." Using medical treatises, trial records, literary sources, and archival documentation, the article argues that, far from being sites primarily associated with crime and prostitution, bathhouses encouraged sociability, brought disparate groups together, and were in fact essential to the circulation and well‐being of people in medieval cities as places of emotional community.