Spring 2012 Faculty Update

Associate Professor of Physics Suzanne Amador Kane received a Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Visitors Travel Grant to travel to the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to perform experiments on the physics of flocking along with Haverford physics majors Marjon Zamani '13 and Alyssa Mayo '13.

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of History Farid Azfar gave an invited lecture,“River Time: The Eighteenth-Century Indus Between the History of Empire and the History of Sexuality,” at Villanova University's Institute for Global Interdisciplinary Studies. Azfar also organized a Mellon symposium at Haverford in March called“The Event Before Sex.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science P.J. Brendese published“The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory and The Presidential Race” in the March 2012 issue of Theory & Event. He also participated in a roundtable entitled“Race, Empire and the Time of Politics,” where he gave a presentation entitled“The Race of Secular Time” at the Annual Conference of the Western Political Science Association in Portland, Oregon. Additionally, Brendese was awarded a Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Faculty Research Grant for a project entitled“Segregated Time: Racialized Mass Incarceration” and a Mellon Tri-College Faculty Forum Seed Grant for a project entitled“(State) Violence and Nation: Memory, Literature, Culture.”

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo gave a master class on his piano music at the Peabody Conservatory. At the piano himself, he recorded a new CD of music by composer Mark Hagerty for release on the Meyermedia label. He was invited to the American Academy in Rome for the month of April as a visiting artist, there composing his String Quartet No. 6, among other works. His hour-long Cantata of the Angels was given a reprise performance by the virtuoso choir T he Crossing, and recorded for subsequent broadcast on WRTI-FM Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer called it“exuberant” and“full of improvisational vitality”

Associate Professor of Psychology Rebecca Compton received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. Compton, whose research focuses on the neural basis of emotion and attention, teaches foundations of psychology as well as courses in cognitive neuroscience and the neuroscience of mental illness.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry Thomas Devaney edited a selection of 33 tree poems for Big Bridge 16, published on May 16. Devaney's book review of Naomi Shihab Nye was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on May 20. The review was also featured on the National Book Critics Circle's website on June 4. Additionally, Devaney presented a talk on John Ashbery and the arts at the New School for Social Research.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Writing Christian DuComb published “Staging Atrocity in Pig Iron Theatre Company's Anodyne” in Theatre Journal.

Associate Professor of Independent College Programs Kaye Edwards attended the 12th annual Nobel Peace Laureate Summit in Chicago through an invitation from the American Friends Service Committee in her role as the faculty director of the Quaker Affairs Office.

Assistant Professor of History Andrew Friedman published“The Global Postcolonial Moment and the American New Town: India, Reston, Dodoma” in The Journal of Urban History. Friedman also presented a paper,“The Domesticity of Counterinsurgency: Edward Lansdale's Houses in Vietnam and Virginia” at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting in Milwaukee.

Edmund and Margiana Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Professor of Anthropology Laurie Hart contributed a response to Stuart Alexander Rockefeller's article,“Flow” in the August 2011 issue of Current Anthropology. She co-authored“Structural Vulnerability and Health: Latino Migrant Laborers in the United States” with James Quesada and Philippe Bourgois, published in Medical Anthropology 30:4, Winter 2011. Hart also presented a paper,“Photography, the Problem of Recognition, and Recuperation from the Greek Civil War (1946-49) and its Cold War Aftermath,” at the conference,“Greek (Hi)stories before the Lens” at King's College, London, 2011, where she also chaired a panel on 20th century popular photographic media in Greece.

Associate Professor of History Darin Hayton was one of the historians of science to participate in the panel“Life, Sex, Death (and Food): A Historical Look at the Science that Drives Us” as part of the Philadelphia Science Festival. For more information: http://www.philasciencefestival.org/events/2012/04/life-sex-death-and-food-historical-look-science-drives-us.

Professor of Computer Science Steven Lindell attended the weeklong workshop“Logical Approaches to Barriers in Complexity II” at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England and gave a presentation on his research entitled“Infinitary Methods in Finite Model Theory.” He also attended another weeklong workshop,“Finite and Algorithmic Model Theory 2012,” at the École de Physique des Houches in France, where he gave the same presentation.

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth gave five lectures at the Centro de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba in Argentina, under the title“Realizing Reason: Serie de conferencias de la Escuela de Filosofia (UNC) 2012 en Homenaje a Horacio Faas.”

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology Wyatt MacGaffey gave a public lecture,“Intellectual Exchanges on the Loango Coast,” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He also gave a talk,“Writing the History of African kingdoms,” as part of the Louis R. Gottschalk Lectures in History at the University of Louisville, and contributed“The plural society in northern Ghana: structural evolution and continuing conflict” to Social Theory and Anthropology in the Caribbean and Beyond (Ian Randle Publishers, 2011).

Assistant Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn gave a paper,“Corporate Decisions: Explaining Variation in Al Qaeda's Organizational Expansion,” at the 53rd annual meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego.

Assistant Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan gave a talk,“Coniuratio! Ethopoeia & Reacting to the Past in the Latin Classroom,” at the 108th Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in Baton Rouge.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Joshua Sabloff presented some new results from joint work with Lisa Traynor (Bryn Mawr College) and Frederic Bourgeois (Universite Libre de Bruxelles) at two conferences: The Tokyo Workshop on Low-Dimensional Topology at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Georgia Topology Conference at the University of Georgia.

Professor of Chemistry Rob Scarrow presented a talk at the 243rd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego. Co-authors on the talk,“Coordination complexes of a tripodal ligand with hydrogen-bonding guanidine groups,” were Kayleigh Herrick-Reynolds '11, Sarina Schwartz '11, Andrew Mumma '11 and Jeffrey Schneider '12. At the same meeting, two seniors working with Scarrow, Jeffrey Schneider '12 and Kevin D'Aquilla '12, presented posters on their research. The talk and posters were part of the“Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry” symposium.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier published “Helium Tunneling through Nitrogen-Functionalized Graphene Pores: Pressure- and Temperature-Driven Approaches to Isotope Separation” in Journal of Physical Chemistry C. Chemistry World, the magazine of the British Royal Society of Chemistry, published an article on Schrier's paper. Schrier also published a paper, “Ethanol concentration by forward osmosis with solar-regenerated draw solution,” in Solar Energy, and gave a talk,“Quantum Chemical Engineering: The feasibility of isotope separation using quantum tunneling effects,” at the University of California, Berkeley.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing Carol Schilling gave a presentation,“Caring for Iris: Moral Work in John Bayley's Memoir of Living with Alzheimer's,” at the Examined Life Conference at the University of Iowa Carver School of Medicine and the Iowa Writers School in Iowa City, Iowa. Schilling also gave a presentation,“ ‘I wouldn't want to live like that': Caregiver and Disability Perspectives on Medical Decision Making,” at the Pastoral Care Ethics Rounds at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Visiting Associate Professor of Art History Carol Solomon received a 2012-13 Middle East and North African Regional Research Program Fulbright Award to undertake research in Morocco and Tunisia on Contemporary Art and Transnational Identity in the Maghreb.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Jill Stauffer gave a paper,“Ibam forte via Sacra: Irony, Knowledge, Power and Testimony,” on a panel she was invited to put together for“The Art and Politics of Irony” conference at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Stauffer also gave an invited presentation,“Ethical Loneliness: Forgiveness, Resentment and Recovery in Law,” at Johns Hopkins University's WGS Workshop on Law and Loss.

Professor Emeritus of Political Science Sidney Waldman published a book, The God in Us, online. You can access it by going to www.sidneywaldman.com.

Associate Professor of Political Science Susanna Wing published “The Coup is Only the Beginning” in the April 11 issue of Foreign Affairs. Wing was also an invited speaker at the World Bank, where she presented at a seminar on“The Sahel region: addressing the security-development challenge;” the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, where she presented“What's Next? Mali and Politics in the Aftermath of the March 22 Coup d'état;” and Columbia University, where she spoke on a panel about post-coup Mali. She also gave a talk,“Democracy, Decentralization and the Tuareg Threat in Mali,” at the seminar“Sahel-North Africa Relations Post Qadhafi, Bahanga and the Arab Spring,” which was sponsored by the Rand Corporation, and gave interviews on the coup in Mali and its interim government to the BBC's Up All Night and The World Today, NPR's The World View, Correio Braziliense, Sky News London, USA Today and Radio France.