Faculty and Staff Notes

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Lisa Ryno published a blog post titled "Tackling Summer Boredom" on the Council on Undergraduate Research's Division of Chemistry website.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand ended the academic year by giving two public talks. He presented "Women in and out of Time: Atalanta and Sappho," on May 17 at the University of Washington in Seattle. He presented a paper on the reception by American classicists of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality on May 25 at a conference in Paris. The conference, Bien Avant la Sexualité, was held in celebration of the first complete translation into French of Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. David Halperin '74, one of the editors of the original volume, also spoke at the conference, on the topic "Mais que s’est-il passé en 1990?"

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Jason Dorwart wrote three essays in the book Disability Experience: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives. Each chapter in the book is an analysis of a piece of autobiographic writing from a disabled person. Dowart's chapters cover Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve, and German sociologist Helmut Dubiel.

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Wendy Beth Hyman gave an invited talk, "Teaching Titus Andronicus when Sexual Violence is on the World Stage," in Cape Town, South Africa, at the Shakespeare and Social Justice conference. She also spoke on the conference roundtable dedicated to books in the field, introducing her co-edited collection, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in October 2019.

Professor of Mathematics Jim Walsh gave an invited presentation on May 23, 2019 at the biennial SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems in Snowbird, Utah. Speaking in the minisymposium "Planetary Motion and its Effects on Climate," Jim presented new research on the mathematical modeling of the glacial cycles. These results were obtained in collaboration with the 2018-19 Department of Mathematics Lenora Lecturer Ester R. Widiasih, associate professor of mathematics at the University of Hawaii.

Meredith M. Gadsby was invited to edit a special cluster issue in the Journal of The African Literature Association about the scholarship of Carole Boyce Davies. Gadsby will write the introduction and anchor article.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance Alice Blumenfeld performs in Tablao Flamenco: Del Campo at Playhouse Square.

Chanda Feldman, assistant professor of creative writing, published a new poem in the Arkansas International  Spring 2019, issue 06.

Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries Alexia Hudson-Ward has been appointed to the Advisory Board of the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. The aim of the fellowship program is to reinvigorate bibliographical studies within the humanities by introducing doctoral candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty to specialized skills, methods, and professional networks for conducting advanced research with material texts.

Steve Crowley will spend June at the Aleksanteri Institute for Russian Studies at the University of Helskinki, Finland. There he will be working to complete a manuscript on "Sta­bil­ity Amid Stag­na­tion: The Polit­ics of Labor and Dein­dus­tri­al­iz­a­tion in Putin's Rus­sia."