Faculty and Staff Notes

Emeritus Professor of Computer Science Richard Salter has been selected to present a talk entitled "A platform for simulating multi-behavioral mode animal movement over complex landscapes" at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in November. Salter's participation is being underwritten by the Institute. The talk is part of the Institute's workshop "Modelling non-Markov Movement Processes".

The Isaac Newton Institute is a national and international visitor research institute in Cambridge, England. It runs research programmes on selected themes in mathematics and the mathematical sciences with applications over a wide range of science and technology. It attracts leading mathematical scientists from the UK and overseas to interact in research over an extended period.

Salter and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Wayne M. Getz of the University of California at Berkeley have been collaborating since 2011, continuing past Salter's retirement from Oberlin in 2016. Their work has resulted in more than 15 publications, several Websites, and workshops preented in Israel, South Africa and Hong Kong. It has been supported by several grants from the National Science Foundation, including one currently in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma to research the spread of bird flu.

EUDEBA (a leading Argentine academic publisher) has brought out a Spanish translation of Marc's Politics as a Science: A Prolegomenon (coauthored with Philippe Schmitter, Emeritus Professor at the European Universities Institute). Translations into Arabic and Chinese are in the works.

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.

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Allegra Hyde received a Pushcart Prize for her story "The Future is a Click Away." First published in BOMB and then in her speculative collection, The Last Catastrophe, the story imagines a near-future community grappling with the seductive power of a corporate algorithm. Recently, Gabrielle Bellot wrote about "The Future is a Click Away" in an article about AI and literature for LitHub, noting that the story shows how "artificial intelligence is already deeply embedded in our culture, yet all too many of us seem to think of it as something new."

"The Future is a Click Away" will appear in the 2024 edition of The Pushcart Prize anthology.

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."