Faculty and Staff Notes

Alysia Ramos, assistant professor of dance, taught a summer workshop at Barnard College in New York.  In August, Ramos and her artistic partner Liz Ivkovich co-created a new immersive dance theater work, Those with Wings inspired by Terry Tempest Williams' memoir When Women Were Birds. The production ran for six sold-out performances and was positively reviewed in the Salt Lake Art Magazine. 

Ann Cooper Albright, professor of dance, was a visiting fellow at the Interweaving Performance Cultures Research Center in Berlin, Germany where she presented a talk entitled “On Being and Unknowing: Moving with an ‘Other’ in Capoeira, Contact Improvisation, and Queer Tango.”  She also performed with Benoit Lachambre at the Freiburg Contact Festival in August.

Bobby Wesner, visiting instructor of dance, along with Holly Handman-Lopez, visiting assistant professor of dance, produced Oberlin Dance Intensive, a week of intensive dancing and sharing for high school students. Wesner and Handman-Lopez also performed their duet Eleven Years in at the Akron Fringe Festival. Wesner’s professional company, Neos Dance Theater, was installed on the third floor of the New Union Center for the Arts in September 2017. 

Holly Handman-Lopez, visiting assistant professor of dance, along with Bobby Wesner, visiting instructor of dance, produced Oberlin Dance Intensive, a week of intensive dancing and sharing for high school students. Handman-Lopez and Wesner also performed their duet Eleven Years in at the Akron Fringe Festival.

Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies, was widely interviewed and quoted about the escalating situation in the Catalonian region of Spain. He co-authored an article in the Nation and was quoted in both the Washington Post and Bill Moyers' Daily Reads. Faber appeared on Democracy Now!, both in television and web features, Real News Network, Free Speech TV's Rising Up with Sonali , and on KPFT's Hi Monitor. He was also interviewed in Slate.

Janet Fiskio and Chie Sakakibara were awarded a $40,000 National Science Foundation conference award for “Oral History and Local Knowledge: Methods of Resilience” in the Arctic Social Sciences Program. The grant supported a community history workshop in Africatown, Alabama at the historic Union Missionary Baptist Church. Approximately 40 community members, Inupiat elders, and Oberlin faculty and students participated in the workshop held during fall 2017.

Sebastiaan Faber, professor of Hispanic studies, co-authored a piece about Catalonia's relationship with Spain for the Nation, "Have Spain and Catalonia Reached a Point of No Return?"

Sheila Miyoshi Jager, professor of East Asian studies, was interviewed and quoted by USA Today in two articles about North Korea, "From Good to Bad: Five Possible Options for What's Next in North Korea-U.S. Standoff," and "North Korea Has Taken Provocatice Actions for Decades, but This Time Could Trigger War."

Assistant Professor of Physics Jillian Scudder has been a regular science contributor for Forbes since 2015. Astroquizzical is an online column dedicated to answering questions about space.