Faculty and Staff Notes

Eric Estes, vice president and dean of students and assistant professor of comparative American studies, gave a campus talk titled “From Margin to Center: Building an Intersectional Movement for an Inclusive and Socially Just Campus” at Vassar College. He was also part of the team that attended the Conference on Campus Climate and Student Engagement sponsored by The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. While at the conference, he had the opportunity to participate on a panel titled “Elements of a Successful Diversity Plan.” Both events were in November.

She will be traveling to the Netherlands to attend a course on computational modeling in adolescent development and to present work on the Nova software platform at the University of Grotenburg. She was interviewed for a piece on Les Racines de L'Obeissance in the November/December issue of the magazine, Le Monde de L'intelligence. In addition, a new version of her measure of parenting style was published in the Chilean journal Psykhe.

Denise Birkhofer, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, has authored the catalogue Latin American Art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum (Oberlin College, 2014). The catalogue chronicles the development of the AMAM’s remarkable yet little-known collection of more than 200 works by Latin American and Latino artists from the 20th and 21st centuries. Birkhofer contributed entries highlighting the works of 35 artists as well as an essay chronicling the history of this diverse collection. In a second essay, Professor of History Steven S. Volk tells from personal experience how he has used the AMAM’s Latin American works to engage students in new ways. The catalogue accompanies the exhibition Latin American and Latino Art at the Allen, the first to showcase this important aspect of the AMAM’s collection as well as the first survey exhibition of modern and contemporary Latin American art in northeast Ohio.

Andria Derstine, the John G. W. Cowles Director at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, recently published the essay “Cultural Policy and the Palace: The French Academy in Rome”, in the volume Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum (OC 1972) with Francesco Freddolini, and published by The Getty Research Institute. She additionally authored a catalogue entry on a painting at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, “Madonna and Child with Saint Francis, ca. 1285”, which has just appeared in the volume Sanctity Pictured: The Art of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trinita Kennedy and published by the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, with Philip Wilson Publishers, London. The AMAM painting is currently on view in an exhibition of the same title, along with another work from the AMAM collection, a manuscript leaf from a gradual that depicts the translation of the body of St. Dominic.

Invited by the University of Leipzig's Area Studies Center to participate in one of a series of events on “Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Professor of Politics Ben Schiff presented the opening address to the May 24-25 workshop on “Human Security/War on Impunity: Yesterday’s Discourses, Today’s Consequences.” Schiff's talk, entitled “The International Criminal Court: Global Order, Sovereignty, and Paradoxes of Legitimacy” launched two days of discussion among scholars and practitioners from the US, Canada, Germany and Denmark on international judicial and humanitarian interventions in conflict.

Professor of Physics Yumi Ijiri recently co-authored an article, entitled "Origin of Surface Canting within Fe3O4 Nanoparticles." The article is published in the journal Physical Review Letters and has been selected as an Editors' Suggestion for that issue. Kathryn Hasz '14, currently a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, is also a co-author, and the work was done in collaboration with scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Department of Energy.

Associate Professor of Politics Eve Sandberg and Kenza Aqertit recently published a book titled Moroccan Women, Activists, and Gender Politics an Institutional Analysis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2014). Sandberg and Aqertit analyze how, over the course of twenty-five years, dedicated, smart, and politically effective Moroccan women, working simultaneously in multiple settings and aware of each other’s work, altered Morocco’s entrenched gender institution of regularized practices and distinctive rights and obligations for men and women.

Professor of English T.S. McMillin was invited to lecture at a symposium in October called Thinking Like a River. The event, sponsored by Wofford College and organized by its Environmental Studies faculty, included roundtable discussions as well as a float down the Pacolet and Broad Rivers in South Carolina. Professor McMillin’s presentation, drawn from his research on the Los Angeles River, was titled “Am I Blue? Strange Ways of an Urban River.” At the host’s behest, he also gave an impromptu lecture on confluences while knee-deep in water at the junction of the Pacolet and Broad.

Science Librarian Alison Ricker was invited to speak at the inaugural meeting of the Michigan Academic Library Association, conveying best practices and lessons learned by the Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO), now celebrating its 40th anniversary. Ricker is a current board member of ALAO and has served in 18 other capacities, including president and other elected positions, during her 30 years of membership in ALAO.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand recently delivered two talks in France. On October 15, he spoke at the University of Strasbourg, on the topic, “Peut-on parler de perversion dans l'Antiquité? Foucault et l'invention du raisonnement psychiatrique.” This event was co-sponsored by the University of Strasbourg and the Laboratoire Archimede.

On October 18, Professor Ormand presented “Mestra in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women” at a conference sponsored by the Projet Eurykleia in Paris, as part of the conferenxce, “Genre et Renommee en Grece Ancienne: Autour du Catalogue des Femmes.” The Projet Eurykleia is a collaboration between the Laboratoire ANHIMA in Paris and the Laboratoire Archimede in Strasbourg.