Faculty and Staff Notes

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Shuming Chen has recently published two papers. "Expedited synthesis of α-amino acids by single-step enantioselective α-amination of carboxylic acids" appeared in Nature Synthesis. Coauthors include Drew Dansby ’24 and collaborators from Marburg, Germany.  "Chemo-, Stereo- and Regioselective Fluoroallylation/Annulation of Hydrazones with gem-Difluorocyclopropanes via Tunable Palladium/NHC Catalysis" was published in Angewandte Chemie. Coauthors on this article include Hieu Nguyen ’25 and collaborators from Renmin University of China.

Evan Kresch presented his paper "What We Do in the Shadows: How Urban Density Facilitates Information Diffusion" in the NOVAFRICA seminar series at the Nova SBE in Lisbon, Portugal.

Grace An was commissioned to write a catalogue essay for the Cinémathèque Française, France's premier film institution, which is launching its first exhibition devoted to a non-male filmmaker: Agnès Varda. The essay explored Varda's "revolutionary" short films during the 1960s, including Black Panthers and Salut les Cubains. The exhibit will open October 2023 and close in January 2024.

An was also commissioned to write a short piece about the film Annie colère (Blandine Lenoir, 2022) for a special issue of Imaginaires (formerly French Film for Historians) dedicated to reproductive politics and care. An is a member of the journal's advisory board.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Jillian Scudder was interviewed live on WWL radio for an hour on May 11 about all things space.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey contributed the chapter "Leave No Mark: Blackness and Inscription in the Inquisitorial Archive," to the volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World. Edited by Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland, the book emerged out of meetings held at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2018 and 2019. These meetings brought together leading scholars of Black art history to debate and remake the "boundaries of modernist art—its notions time and again focused on the singular white male European or American artist—with another set of imperatives, ethics, and histories, broadening our understanding of the past and present of modernism."

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey presented his paper "Fugitive Landscapes and the Challenge of Black Atlantic Cartographies: Brazil, 1763" at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Rarey's paper was one of eleven invited presentations at Dumbarton Oaks' Spring Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium, entitled "Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora," organized by N. D. B. Connolly and Oscar de la Torre. The symposium brought together archaeologists, historians, art historians, and landscape architects to discuss and debate place-based histories of landscapes, waterscapes, and environments of the Black Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the twentieth century.

Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager published her latest book, The Other Great Game: The Opening of Korea and the Birth of Modern East Asia, "A dramatic new telling of the dawn of modern East Asia, placing Korea at the center of a transformed world order wrought by imperial greed and devastating wars."

Sidnhy Cheng, Tiffany Yuen, and Visiting Assistant Professor Daniel Zipp presented their research supported by Oberlin College’s student research assistantship grant at the annual meetings of the Urban Affairs Association in Nashville, TN. Their presentation focusing on Cleveland’s Asiatown neighborhood was entitled “From Chinatown to Asiatown: The Evolution of Asian American Neighborhoods.”

Associate Professor of Music Theory Joseph Lubben presented a paper, "Las síncopas hipermétricas," and a poster, "La enseñanza de la síncopa en el conservatorio del siglo XXI" at the inaugural meeting of SATMUS (la sociedad de análisis y teoría musical) in Madrid on April 21 and 22. Both papers were delivered in Spanish.
 

Assistant Professor of Theater Kari Barclay's newest article on asexuality in theater was recently published in March 2023's Theatre Topics. The article builds on their play, Can I Hold You?, which Kari wrote in 2018 and was one of the first plays to explore asexual identity.