Faculty and Staff Notes

Billy Hart, the conservatory's longtime associate professor of jazz percussion, was named a 2022 Jazz Master. This is the nation’s highest honor for jazz musicians, bestowed annually by the National Endowment for the Arts. He will be honored at the Jazz Masters Tribute Concert on Thursday, March 31, 2022.

A member of Oberlin's faculty since 2000, Hart has performed on more than 600 recordings. This June he released the album All Things Are (Smoke Sessions Records) alongside pianist Kevin Hays and bassist Ben Street. It was recorded live—for a streaming audience, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic—at New York’s Smoke Jazz & Supper Club in December 2020.

Professor of Classics Drew Wilburn will be a collaborator on the Books of Karanis Project, for which C. Michael Sampson, University of Manitoba is the Principal Investigator. 

The Books of Karanis was recently awarded a $94,000 Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council. The Books of Karanis will contextualize seventy-four fragmentary books from the ancient site of Karanis, a Greek, Roman, and Egyptian settlement occupied from around 200 BCE  to 600 CE. The collaborative project brings together the research expertise of papyrologists, literary specialists, and archaeologists to reconstruct ancient Greek literary culture. The research project is investigating who read these texts, how they might have read them, and in what contexts reading took place.

Wilburn will bring archaeological expertise through his work as the principal investigator of the Karanis Housing Project, which has been developing a digital map of the archaeological site and populating the map with all of the finds from the University of Michigan excavations (1924-1935). The Karanis Housing Project includes current student research collaborators Emily Hudson '22, Grace Burns '23, Elliot Diaz '23, Henri Feola '23, and many former Oberlin students. 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Politis Joshua Freedman presented new research on the international status politics of climate governance at the European Workshop in International Studies.

Maureen Peters, professor of biology and director of the Oberlin Pre-Health Program, and biology graduate Alexandra Wooldredge '21 attended and presented at the 23rd International C. Elegans Meeting (#Worm21), held virtually June 21-24, 2021. The poster, “Investigating the dietary restriction phenotype caused by disrupted intestinal cell-to-cell communication,” explores how digestive disruptions lead to reprogramming of whole animal physiology at the level of gene expression, life history, and response to environmental stimuli. 

The presentation drew on the work of former Oberlin students Leandre Glendenning, Calista Diehl, Kefei (Nina) Li, Mercedes Campos-Lopez, Max Scott, and Rachael McMinimy; as well as Peters’ collaborators, Britta Spanier, Elena Holzmann, and Anna Kvindt, of the TUM School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan, Technische Universit München, Freising, Germany.

Assistant professor of Creative Writing Chanda Feldman has published three new poems, "The Air Roiled," "Diaspora," and "The Birds Come" in the latest issue of the Denver Quarterly, Vol. 55. No.3.

Associate Professor of Sociology Greggor Mattson recently published an article of research designed and executed by three undergraduates in his Alcohol and Culture senior seminar.

Alexandra Hamada '13, Han Guel Jung '14 , and Karl Orozco '13 conducted interviews and focus groups with Asian and Asian American students about the alcohol flush reaction (AFR). AFR describes the symptoms experienced people with a variant allele for processing alcohol in the body, resulting in symptoms ranging from blushing of the face, neck and chest; to nausea, dizziness, headache, and vomiting. The students found that Asian students had strong meanings attached to the trait, while white students didn't notice it—even when they themselves possessed it. These findings challenged existing research on AFR and revealed deeper insights about anticipated stigma and self racialization.

Barker Professor of Music Theory Jared Hartt published a co-edited volume, Poetry, Art, and Music in Guillaume de Machaut's Earliest Manuscript (BnF fr. 1586). It is the first book entirely devoted to the manuscript.

Professor of Politics Stephen Crowley was the lead instructor for Ohio State University's Summer Global Teacher Seminar on "Global Protests and Social Justice Activism."

Professor of Hispanic Studies Sebastiaan Faber has coauthored a piece in The Nation magazine on the Spanish government's decision to pardon nine Catalan leaders who were sent to prison for their involvement in a referendum for independence. Faber, whose new book Exhuming Franco (Vanderbilt University Press) came out in April, is also featured in Noiser's new podcast series Real Dictators, narrated by Paul McGann.

Sonia Kruks, Robert S. Danforth Professor of Politics Emerita, recently presented a paper at the (virtual) international conference, “Simone de Beauvoir: New Perspectives for the 21st Century.” Her paper, titled “Old Age and Intersectionality: Beauvoir and Beyond,” drew on Beauvoir’s work to reflect on the troubling exclusion of old age from consideration in intersectional social and political theory.