Faculty and Staff Notes

Politics Chair and Professor Eve Sandberg attended faculty development workshops at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) April 14-15, 2016, in New York. Panels of policy makers and scholars discussed various American foreign policy challenges and Sandberg was tasked with playing President Obama in a simulation of the situation room regarding the current crisis in Southern Sudan.

Andaleeb Badiee Banta, curator of European and American art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, has been named the Samuel H. Kress Foundation/AAMC affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome. During her four-week stay at the American Academy, Banta will visit several significant collections of old master drawings in Rome to further her research for “Old Master Drawings @ Oberlin," a proposed online catalogue of the AMAM's European drawings.

Chie Sakakibara, assistant professor of environmental studies, served as a moderator at the Global Issues Symposium for the panel “Resilience at the Local Level: Environmental Attitude and Knowledge in Indigenous Communities” on April 8, 2016. The panelists included Caroline Cannon (Iñupiaq environmental activist from Point Hope, Alaska, Goldman Prize recipient of 2012), Amy Margaris (associate professor of anthropology), Frank Kelderman (visiting assistant professor of comparative American studies), and Matt Bahar (assistant professor of history).

Sakakibara also served as an invited panelist for the symposium Ice Cubed: An Inquiry into the Aesthetics, History, and Science of Ice at Columbia University, where she discussed the influence of climate change on indigenous peoples in the Arctic.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Crystal Biruk gave an invited lecture at a workshop on health and science in the African world on April 15 at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Taylor L. Field ’15 coauthored an article in the Journal of GLBT Families with Greggor Mattson, associate professor of sociology and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies.

The piece, “Parenting Transgender Children in PFLAG,” grew out of Field’s independent research that eventually became her sociology honors thesis and GSFS capstone. The article analyzes 14 of her interviews with the parents of transgender children drawn from PFLAG, a national support group that provides a model of "activist parenting" and was one of the first national organizations to include transgender in its mission statement.

In the piece, the parents of transgender children recounted four ways in which their parenting experiences were more difficult and isolating than those of the parents lesbian, bisexual, or gay children: the physical changes their children undergo, the lack of media representations of transgender lives, the effect of their child’s gender transition on their identity as a parent, and the tensions involved in their child’s successful transition in public settings.

Parental isolation may be alleviated, however, by recognizing four unrecognized similarities shared among parents of GLBT children: adjusting to changes in their child’s appearance, the process of grief and mourning, the tendency to hierarchically rank parental difficulties, and fears of being a bad parent. The isolation faced by parents of transgender children is imposed not only by anti-trans prejudice and lack of information, but also by the unacknowledged and undiscussed ways in which a child’s gender transition affects parental gender identities.

Taylor Field is currently a graduate student in sociology at the University of Michigan, where her project recently earned her a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Erik Inglis, professor of Medieval art history and cochair of the art department, has published “Expertise, Artifacts, and Time in the 1534 Inventory of the Saint-Denis Treasury,” in the March 2016 issue of Art Bulletin (pgs. 14-42).

Associate Professor of History Annemarie Sammartino has published “Mass Housing, Late Modernism, and the Forging of Community in New York City and East Berlin, 1965-1989" in the American Historical Review (Volume 121, Issue 2, Pgs. 492-521).

Co-op City in New York City and Marzahn in East Berlin were constructed in the late 1960s and late 1970s, respectively. This article explores both the intentions of their planners and the experiences of their residents in these two very different societies. It challenges the standard narrative of urban modernism, which sees its demise with the growth of new urbanist critiques of the 1960s.

Instead, it posits that urban modernism proved flexible enough to respond to this challenge with developments like Co-op City and Marzahn, which were simultaneously more ambitious, more defensive, and more thoughtful about the nature and meaning of urban community than their modernist predecessors in the immediate postwar period. Finally, Sammartino argues that late modernist ideas about community, in particular a kind of urban community that offered a contrast to American-style consumerism, provide a connective thread across the Iron Curtain in the later Cold War.

Professor of Mathematics Bob Bosch recently gave two talks at the invitation-only Gathering for Gardner Conference, held in Atlanta every two years in honor of Martin Gardner, who wrote Scientific American’s "Mathematical Games" column from 1956 to 1981.

Bosch's first talk, "Numerically Balanced Dice," a collaboration with The Dice Lab's Robert Fathauer and Henry Segerman, unveiled the world's first mass-produced injection-molded 120-sided die (based on the disdyakis triacontahedron). The die is numerically balanced in that numbers on opposite sides sum to 121, and all of the vertex sums are exactly what they should be (the degree of the vertex times the average of the numbers on the die).

Bosch's second talk, "Game-of-Life Animations," presented Game-of-Life patterns that resemble works of art (including a Magritte still life, a portrait of John Horton Conway, the game's inventor, and two animations based on Eadward Muybridge's locomotion studies).

Professor of Psychology Nancy Darling made five presentations, participated in two roundtable panels, and presented three research papers at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence in Baltimore.

For the Editor’s roundtable panel, Darling discussed writing and publication. She discussed professional issues for the roundtable Navigating the Mid-Career Years.

The three research papers Darling presented included:

• A Dynamic Systems Simulation of the Patterning of Attachment Dyads: Co-authored by student Caitlyn Grubb and alumnus Ian Burns, the work grew out of Darling and Grubb’s work in an advanced methods course last Spring. It used the Nova software developed by Professor of Computer Science Richard Salter to model social networks of dating couples in early adulthood.
• Seeking and Providing Support: Are There Normative Differences in Adolescent and Adult Romantic Dyads?: Based on observational data coded by teams of Oberlin students, the work was co-authored by Grubb and student Kinsey Denney.
• Adolescent Information within the Family Context: This work continues Darling’s studies of adolescent disclosure and lying in a longitudinal study of Chilean youth.

A paper coauthored by Professor of Computer Science Richard Salter was presented on April 4 at the 2016 Spring Simulation Multi-Conference of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International in Pasadena, California. The paper, "An Agent-Based Model of School Closing in Under-Vaccinated Communities During Measles Outbreaks”, was presented by Salter’s colleague and co-author, Wayne M. Getz, professor of ecology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Salter and Getz used the 2014-15 measles outbreak in California as the basis for a stochastic, spatially-structured, agent-based Nova model of the spread of infection. The model shows that immunity within a locality requires vaccination coverage of at least 85 percent, and that a policy of “sending unvaccinated students home from school” in low coverage communities is extremely effective in shutting down outbreaks of measles. Salter was once again responsible for design and creation of the model, which joins eight other conference and journal papers using Salter’s Nova platform published in the last 18 months.