Faculty and Staff Notes

Oberlin College's Office of Environmental Sustainability (OES) internship program is featured in "Guide to Creating & Managing Sustainability Internship Programs," a new resource from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Bridget Flynn, Sustainability Coordinator for the Office of Environmental Sustainability (OES), contributed to the guide. 

At the November joint SDHS/CORD conference, Ann Cooper Albright, Professor of Dance and Chair of the Dance Department at Oberlin College, officially became President of the Society of Dance History Scholars, an international organization of dance scholars dedicated to furthering the field of dance studies. She is also the program chair for their next meeting (June 2015), which will focus on dance advocacy in Athens, Greece.

Ron Cheung, associate professor of Economics, along with coauthor Rachel Meltzer, has published the paper "Why and Where Do Homeowners Associations Form?" in CityScape, the policy journal published by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. To download the paper, visit here.

In May, Peter Swendsen released Allusions to Seasons and Weather, a new recording on the Oberlin Music label. To create the recording, Swendsen, an associate professor of computer music and digital arts in Oberlin’s TIMARA Department, devoted a year to studying soundscape composition and ecoacoustics as a Fulbright Fellow in Oslo, Norway.

For more information on Allusions to Seasons and Weather, click here.

Sylvia Watanabe, associate professor of creative writing, was a featured reader at the Lougheed Festival of the Arts at SUNY Potsdam last May. She read from her novel-in-progress, “The Atomic History of Cassidy Bright.” An excerpt from the book, “The Lady in the Song,” has appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of the “Nashville Review,” published by Vanderbilt University.

Crystal Biruk published an article titled “‘Aid for gays:’ The moral and the material in ‘African homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi” in “The Journal of Modern African Studies.”

On September 24, Professor of East Asian Studies Sheila Miyoshi Jager gave a talk at the Korean War 64th Anniversary International Academic Seminar held at Daegu, South Korea. The event was sponsored by Yeongnam University's Institute of Korean Unification and the Korean Army Academy at Yeongchon. Under the theme of “Beyond the Korean War and Toward Unification” the conference examined paths toward Korean unification. Miyoshi Jager's talk, based on her recent book “Brothers At War: The Unending Conflict in Korea,” provided the historical context.

Miyoshi Jager is currently in Korea for the 2014-15 academic year under a Fulbright grant to research her next book on the history of Great Power rivalry over Northeast Asia at the end of the 19th century.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Travis Wilson is the recipient of the 2014 American Educational Research Association’s Outstanding Dissertation Award in the field of Human Development. The award goes to the most outstanding publication in the field of human development stemming from a doctoral dissertation. Wilson’s paper was co-authored by Dr. Philip C. Rodkin (deceased) and was published in the 2013 volume of Child Development, the flagship journal of the Society for Research in Child Development:

Wilson, T.M., & Rodkin, P. C. (2013). Children’s cross-ethnic relations in contemporary elementary schools: Concurrent and prospective associations between ethnic segregation and social status. Child Development, 84, 1081-1097.

Renee Romano, professor of history, comparative American studies, and africana studies, has published a new book with Harvard University Press. “Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders” examines the phenomenon of the reopening and contemporary prosecutions of civil rights era killings.

In the 1950s and 1960s, few whites who turned to violence to try to impede the struggle for black civil rights were even charged with the murders they committed in the effort to uphold white supremacy. But in recent decades, state and federal authorities—often facing intense lobbying from families of victims—have reopened cold cases and tried now-elderly men in many of the most infamous racially motivated murders of the civil rights era. Drawing on sources ranging from trial transcripts to made-for-TV movies, Romano explores the political pressures and cultural developments that drove the legal system to revisit these decades-old murders, what happened in the courtroom when cases came before a jury, how trials have been represented in popular culture, and how different groups—from progressive activists to conservative politicians—have sought to use contemporary prosecutions to further their political agendas.

In addition, she recently gave a talk about the book at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, as well as giving a paper entitled “Historical Memory and the Contemporary Prosecution of Civil Rights-Era Crimes” at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.

Wendy Kozol’s new book, “Visible Wars and the Ambivalences of Witnessing,” was published by the University of Minnesota Press in fall 2014. This study brings a new perspective to enduring concerns about the efficacy of conflict photography and other forms of visual advocacy. In the 21st century, visuality has been a pivotal technology in U.S. militarism, as well as in critiques of the nation at war. This book analyzes both mainstream media and alternative visual projects to understand how representations of the U.S. at war navigate in, through, and around national security logics. Visual witnessing, she argues, often remains bound up in national security agendas even as it may stretch beyond those agendas into other terrains of possibility.

For the past two years, Wendy has also been working with a former student, Rebecca Adelman (OC ’01) on a new project titled “The War In Between.” Their first publication appeared this fall: “Banality: Discordant Affects and the Ethics of Spectatorship.” Theory & Event, vol. 17, issue 3 (2014).

Wendy also published two other articles this fall: “Witnessing Genocide and the Challenges of Ethical Spectatorship,” Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography, eds. S. Brophy and J. Hladki (U Toronto P); and “Witnessing Precarity: Photojournalism, Women’s/Human/Rights, and the War in Afghanistan,” in The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, ed. Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (I.B. Tauris).