Faculty and Staff Notes

Associate Professor of Financial Economics Udara Peiris presented his paper, “Corporate Legacy Debt, Inflation, and the Efficacy of Monetary Policy,” at the World Congress of the Econometric Society (August 18-22, 2025, Seoul, South Korea), the society’s flagship meeting, held every five years.

Assistant Professor of Politics Joshua Freedman published "Can Status Competition Save the World? Grafting, Green Energy, and the Climate Crisis" in International Organization. It included valuable research assistance by Anna Silverman ’22, Nathan Englehart ’23, and Sophia Cartsonis ’24.

Department of Psychology Research Technician Peter Naegele will be teaching Oberlin's first course that leverages AI to carry out data analysis using the programming and data analysis software RStudio. Students will learn to perform psychological data analyses using R confidently, understand the logic of programming, and utilize AI to enhance their research workflows.

Professor of Philosophy Todd Ganson presented his paper "The Dual Function of Sensory Systems: Reporting on Stimuli and Affordances" at the Summer Mind Workshop held at Columbia University's Mind Brain Behavior Institute.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Asif Iqbal published Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (Routledge). A comparative study of 20th- and 21st-century Bengali vernaculars and South Asian anglophone diasporic novels, the book recasts the framing of South Asian cross-border entanglements and fractures in literary postcolonial studies.

Assistant Professor of Music Theory Christa Cole ’17 recently gave the keynote talk at the annual Western University Graduate Symposium on Music. In her talk, “Effort as Structure in Musical Performance,” Cole analyzed dimensions of effort—gesture, instrumental affordances, and performativity—in works by post-1900 composers, and she showed how effort itself can serve as a structuring dimension of music.

Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand co-organized an international conference on the topic of "Women in/and Invective in Greek and Roman Antiquity." Held in Strasbourg, France, from May 26-28, the conference was co-sponsored by the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study, the University of Strasbourg, and Oberlin College; it included participants from the U.S., France, and U.K. Ormand's paper was titled "Origin Stories: Archilochos and His Muses."

Professor of Comparative Literature Stiliana Milkova published an article in Spanish, "Ariadna en la playa: las mitologías de Elena Ferrante," and two book reviews: Vera Mutafchieva's The Case of Cem (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) and Nadia Terranova's The Night Trembles (translated from Italian by Ann Goldstein).

In June, Professor of Dance Ann Cooper Albright was honored with the Dance Studies Association's 2025 Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award for her sustained contributions to the field of dance studies, which include six monographs and four edited collections of essays. She also taught intensive contact workshops on the east and west coasts this summer.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Anna Levett published the article “'The Trees' POV': Refugee Landscapes in Postrevolutionary Tunisian Cinema." It appeared as part of the roundtable "Ecocritical Terrains: Rethinking Tamazghan and Middle Eastern Landscapes" in the flagship area studies journal International Journal of Middle East Studies. Levett also recently published an interview with Robyn Creswell, a scholar and translator of Arabic, in Reading in Translation.