Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Professor of Anthropology Cal Biruk gave an invited book talk (Cooking Data, Duke Universtiy Press) at Princeton University's Global Health Colloquium on October 5.

Heidi Thomann Tewarson, professor emerita of German language and literature, brought out her new book Die ersten Zürcher Ärztinnen. Humanitäres Engagement und wissenschaftliche Arbeit zur Zeit der Eugenik (The First Zurich Women Physicians. Humanitarian Engagement and Scientific Work during the Age of Eugenics). Published by Schwabe of Basel, Switzerland, Tewarson’s study tells the story of four pioneering Swiss women physicians, who entered their profession at the end of the nineteenth century and developed a special interest in the new discipline of psychiatry. Confronting the developing field of eugenics espoused by their male mentors, they objected to its ideologically driven aspects, including biologically determined heritability of mental disease, alcoholism, and other deviant social traits, and degeneration theories that disadvantaged women and the poor. As their scientific publications show, they remained committed both to empirical science and humanitarian values, including the care, welfare, and the rights of women. The study's broadly conceived exploration also provides insight into the broader medical and social history during these turbulent times.

Jiyul Kim, visiting instructor of history, presented a lecture on October 5, 2018, at Kendal at Oberlin about U.S. global engagement and the military as part of Kendal's Great Decisions lecture series. 

Sebastiaan Faber, professor and chair of Hispanic Studies, published an article about Amsterdam's new city government in the Nation magazine on October 2. On October 3, together with Gijs Mulder, he published an interview with the Catalan president-in-exile, Carles Puigdemont, in the Spanish Revista Contexto. On September 29, Faber was interviewed on the KPFA evening news (Berkeley, CA) about the escalating situation in Catalonia. He was also interviewed for the October issue of the monthly magazine La Marea about an investigative piece that revealed irregularities in the Ph.D thesis by Spain's prime minister, Pedro Sánchez--a topic that dominated Spanish national news in September.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition Hal Sundt's piece "Norman Doors" was published in the New York Times Magazine.

Professor of Economics Ron Cheung gave a talk at Brock University in Canada about household debt and local public finances.

Donald R. Longman Professor of English Sandra Zagarell authored the following articles: "Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of The Pointed Firs,” Handbook of the American Novel of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Christine Gerhardt, De Grutyer, 2018; “Engaging Contradictions” Lydia Sigourney’s Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since, Reinventing Lydia Sigourney, ed. Mary Lou Kete and Elizabeth Petrino, University of New England Press, 2018; Review of Janet Dean, Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy, ALH Online Review Series  IXV.

Associate Professor of Sociology Rick Baldoz gave the keynote address at the Legally Liminal Asians Conference at Brown University on September 28, 2018.

Associate Professor of History Shelley Lee published the following: “‘Where Others Have Failed': Korean Immigrants and the Reinvention of Entrepreneurship in 1970s and 1980s America” Journal of Asian American Studies 21, no. 3 (October 2018): 341-366; “From Unwatchable Life to Consumable Spectacle: On History and the Black-Korean Conflict,” Asian Diaspora Visual Cultures and the Americas 4 (2018): 280-296; “The Party’s Over: Sex, Gender, and Orientalism in the Koreagate Scandal of the 1970s,” Frontiers 39, no. 2 (2018).

Matthew Rarey, assistant professor of art history, was awarded a 2018-2019 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his book project, Insignificant Things: Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic. Professor Rarey is spending his fellowship year as a visiting scholar in the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University.