Faculty and Staff Notes

On February 28 and April 2, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies Sergio Gutiérrez delivered  invited lectures in the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and in University of Texas, Permian Basin. His talks, on figures of labor and idleness, respectively, in 19th century Mexican economic discourse are part of his forthcoming book, Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence.

Emeritus Professor of History Steven Volk was interviewed for an episode of the EdSurge podcast on April 12. The topic: "Did Liberal Arts Colleges Miss a Chance to Become More Inclusive After the Pandemic?"

Yveline Alexis was a featured speaker for Brown University's Archival Voices lecture series where she gave a talk on "Haitian Voices and Multilingual Sources." She was also a guest panelist for Brown's Watson Institute's symposium on "Haiti's Overlapping Crises: Is There a Way Through?"

Assistant Professor of Dance, Al Evangelista, was one of the curators and contributors for Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, Chat Vol. 1: Social Choreography in the Digital: where bodies might. The contributions center on forms of digital care, reflecting the range of innovative digital care practices that the pandemic finally made widely available. 

Jackie Oh, fourth-year sociology and biology double-major, presented a research paper with coauthor Alicia Smith-Tran, assistant professor of sociology, at the North Central Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The paper is titled, "The Physician Biography Video: A Tool for Shaping a Personal and Institutional Public Image."

Associate Professor of Computer Science Cynthia Taylor published a paper titled "How Do I Get People to Use My Ideas?: Lessons from Successful Innovators in CS Education" in the Proceedings of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE).

On March 20, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered the 2023 Stern Lecture at the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans. Rarey's talk, "Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Cartography: Brazil, 1763," is based on recent archival research in Brazil and Portugal, and forms part of his in-progress book manuscript about eighteenth-century colonial maps of maroon communities in South America and the afterlives of these maps in the work of contemporary Black artists and land rights activists in Brazil.

Professor of Geosciences Zeb Page recently published a paper in the Journal of Metamorphic Geology in collaboration with geochemists from England and Scotland entitled "A rutile and titanite record of subduction fluids: Integrated oxygen isotope and trace element analyses in Franciscan high-pressure rocks."

Tim Weiss’ newest recording on the BIS label, Missy Mazolli: Dark With Excessive Bright, includes several instrumental pieces by the formerly opera-focused Mazolli, with featured performances by violin soloist Peter Herresthal. Weiss leads Norway’s Arctic Philharmonic in four works on the recording. For six seasons, Weiss was artistic director of the Arctic Philharmonic Sinfonietta and he continues to be a regular guest. The album has garnered a number of rave reviews.

The Strad (free e-newsletter subscription needed) writes that “musicians from the Arctic Philharmonic provide rich, detailed support in Dark with Excessive Bright,” while the “ensemble truly comes into its own in three recent works – Sinfonia (from Orbiting Spheres), These Worlds in Us and Orpheus Undone – which receive vividly etched, expertly paced accounts.”

The Arts Fuse credits Weiss’ direction in These Worlds in Us: “Unfolding essentially like a set of variations, its pulsing, turbulent textures and captivating sense of musical space are strongly etched by Tim Weiss and the Arctic Philharmonic.”

Assistant Professor of Dance Al Evangelista is featured in The Inside Story podcast for his role as an advisory board member for the Institute for Empathic Narrative. The Institute is funded by an American Council of Learned Societies grant and is featured on the ACLS site.