Fall 2024 Faculty Update

Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian gave the keynote talk "FLAMEnet: A network of institutional change makers focused on harnessing factors affecting learning, attitudes, and mindsets in undergraduate education" at the annual Middle Atlantic Association of Liberal Arts Chemistry Teachers conference. She also served on the fall Chemical Synthesis and Biosynthesis Study Section at the National Institutes of Health.

Professor of Psychology Rebecca Compton received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to support research on neural markers of executive function and emotion regulation in relation to life stress in young adulthood.

Associate Professor of Religion Molly Farneth's second book, The Politics of Ritual (Princeton University Press, 2023), was awarded the American Academy of Religion's 2024 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion (analytical-descriptive category).

In early November, the Janet and Henry Richotte 1985 Professor of Asian Studies Hank Glassman gave a talk titled "Care for the Dead in Japanese Buddhism: the Body, the Five Elements, and the Absolute" at Washington University in St. Louis as the Robert Morrell Memorial Annual Lecture in Asian Religions. The talk is part of an ongoing project on rituals and monuments related to death, family, and remembrance in Japanese history.

The Frank A. Kafker Professor of History Lisa Jane Graham published "Sex in the City: Policing Debauchery in Eighteenth-Century Paris" in Pascal Bastien, ed., Policing and Urban Society in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford Studies in Enlightenment, 2024).

Associate Professor of Computer Science Alvin Grissom II and Associate Professor of Psychology Ryan Lei published "Considering How Machine-Learning Algorithms (Re)produce Social Biases in Generated Faces" in Social and Personality Psychology Compass with Matthew Gusdorff  '23 as the first author, as well as former Visiting Assistant Professor Jeova F. S. Rocha Neto (now at Bowdoin), Yikang Lin '22, and Ryan Trotter '22.

Executive Director of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Eric Hartman published "Outrage, othering, and campus peace advocacy" in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Work by Professor of Fine Arts Hee Sook Kim has been featured in the following exhibitions:

Solo exhibition
Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Everlasting Playground, Gwangju, South Korea

Group exhibitions
The Plastic Club, American Color Print Society, Annual Member Exhibition, Philadelphia
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco Art Fair, San Francisco
Philadelphia Print Consortium, University of the Arts, Print Philly 2024, Philadelphia
Art Mora Gallery, Prints, Ridgefield Park, N.J.
Espronceda Institute of Art and Culture, Voices: Cultural Diplomacy, Barcelona, Spain
Cheltenham Center for the Arts, Explorations: Print Exhibition, Philadelphia

Assistant Professor of Music Mei-ling Lee had her composition Summoner featured at the MUSICACOUSTICA-HANGZHOU 2024 conference in Hangzhou, China, in September. Summoner was also included in the 24th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2024) in Utrecht, Netherlands, in September, where it was selected from a large pool of submissions for its unique approach to interactive music and technology.

In addition to these events, Lee's composition Run, written for double bass, voice, and live electronics, had its world premiere at New York University in May. Performed by bassist Keenan Zach, Run was featured as the final concert of the 2024 SEAMUS Conference and was well-received for its emotional depth and technical creativity.

Video recordings of both compositions are available at the following links:
Summoner
Run

Associate Professor and Haverford Chair of Linguistics Brook Danielle Lillehaugen and Felipe H. Lopez presented the talk "Ticha: leveraging academy-based digital scholarship for community agendas and undergraduate pedagogy" (co-authored with George Aaron Broadwell and Xóchitl Flores-Marcial) at the Workshop on Historical Language Texts, Methods for Re-use in Berlin, Germany on Sept. 3. Lillehaugen also co-organized the workshop.

Kristin Lindgren, director of the Writing Center and faculty member in the Writing Program, in collaboration with Associate Director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, VCAM, and Campus Exhibitions Matthew Callinan and Samantha Mitchell, exhibitions manager at the Center for Creative Works, has received a $360,000 grant from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to support the multi-part project LOOK HERE, which will include two exhibitions of work created by disabled artists in supported/progressive studios, a national symposium bringing together artists, facilitators, administrators, curators, and gallerists working in or with progressive studies, and a publication focused on this work.

Professor and Chair of Mathematics and Statistics Robert Manning published the single-author article "Laplace Approximation of J-factors for rigid base and rigid base pair models of DNA cyclization" in Biophysical Journal (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2024.10.012).

Associate Professor of Computer Science Sara Mathieson gave a keynote presentation at the CeMEB Autumn Assembly 2024 at the Tjärnö Marine Laboratory in Sweden (attended virtually). Her Oct. 22 talk was titled "Interpreting deep learning methods for population genetic inference."

Professor and Chair of Sociology Matthew McKeever and co-author Nichols Wolfinger published Thanks for Nothing: The Economics of Single Motherhood Since 1980 (Oxford University Press).

Associate Professor and Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Associate Professor of Visual Studies Erin Schoneveld was named the 2024 NCAA Division III Faculty Athletic Representative Association (FARA) Newcomer of the Year.

She also published the article "Collecting Japanese Posters: Erin Schoneveld in Conversation with Merrill C. Berman," in Impressions, vol. 45, no. 2 ( 2024): 62-97.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Zeynep Sertbulut published an open-access article titled  "They Don't Care What We Watch: On Ratings and Culture-making in the Dizi Industry" in the Visual Anthropology Review Vol: 40 (2). She chaired and presented at the “Politics of Culture” panel at the 2024 Middle East Studies Conference and shared her research at the 2024 American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting. Sertbulut also received the Together with Humanities Grant to support her spring course "Human Rights: Culture, Language, and Power." Most recently, Sertbulut has been invited to present her work at a roundtable on "Revisioning Media in SWANA Anthropology" at the UK Royal Anthropological Film Conference and on the panel “Streaming Across Borders: Redefining Global in Media Industries” at the 2025 Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference.

The William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English Gustavus Stadler was appointed co-editor of the music section of Public Books with Professor Gayle Wald of George Washington University.

Associate Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Jill Stauffer published "The Stories We Tell: On selves and risk in Arendt and Levinas," in Arendt Studies, Volume 8, 2024, “Arendt and Ethical Traditions.”

Stauffer also presented "Ethical Loneliness: On Hearing and Being Heard," at the BC Nurses Union Human Rights and Equity Caucus 2024 Conference, on November 13, 2024, in Surrey, British Columbia, Canada.

In late September, she presented "What seems to be settled is not settled: Comments on Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics by Benjamin P. Davis" for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Rochester N.Y.

Associate Professor and Chair of Psychology Shu-wen Wang and six of her students have had three publications published (or accepted/in press) by peer-reviewed journals. All three papers were lead authored by students.

Benjamin, L. R. & Wang, S. (2024). "Coping, connection appraisal, and well-being during COVID-19 in the U.S., Japan, and Mexico," Frontiers in Psychology: Health Psychology, 15, 1420327. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1420327

Weisblum, M., Zhu, C., Ajila, T., & Wang, S. (2024). "Social connectedness protects against the impact of adverse childhood experiences on first-year undergraduate adjustment," Emerging Adulthood, 12(6), 996-1009. DOI: 10.1177/21676968241276231

Zhu, C., Chun, A., Shin, E., & Wang, S. (in press). "Youth-directed racial-ethnic socialization and family processes in Asian immigrant families," Asian American Journal of Psychology.

In September, the Douglas & Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies David Harrington Watt gave the presentation "Is There a Distinctive Quaker Approach to War and Peace?" at Merion Friends Meeting.