Spring 2013 Faculty Update

Assistant Professor of German Imke Brust presented the paper“The Return of the Repressed– Arendt and Fanon on Rage Against the State” at the March Psychoanalysis and Politics Winter Symposium,“Eruptions, Disruptions and Returns of the Repressed,” in Helsinki, Finland. Brust also co-organized the Coalition of Women in German Studies panel,“Heimat as a Gendered Space,” at the January MLA Annual Convention in Boston, Mass.

In June, 27 years after completing her mathematics Ph.D. at MIT, Professor of Mathematics Lynne Butler completed her statistics M.S. at the University of Chicago, where she also earned her undergraduate degree.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo performed a piano recital of contemporary Italian and American music at the Vivaldi Conservatory in Alessandria, Italy, co-sponsored by Rive Gauche Concerti of Torino. The program included the world premiere of Franco Cavallone's "Ombre allungate," dedicated to Cacioppo. Leading up to the recital, he gave three days of master classes for composition and piano students at the Conservatory. In addition, his music was broadcast on WOMR Provincetown and WRTI Philadelphia, and was performed on campus by pianist and teaching affiliate Debra Lew Harder, and by student piano soloists Bruce Leto '14 and Nick Seltzer '15. His orchestral piece“Invocation and Dance of the Mountain Gods,” from the CD Laws of the Pipe, was released on Parma Recordings' online digital album Fine Music, Vol. 4.  Cacioppo also chaired an external review committee in music at Lafayette College.

Assistant Professor of History Andrew Friedman presented a paper,“Meridians and Parallels: Racial Formations on the Global Grid,” at the conference“Empires of Capital: Race Across the Atlantic and the Pacific” at the University of Washington, in Seattle, in May. Also in May, Friedman presented a paper,“Persian Aryanism, Suburban Orientalism and the Co-Constituted Landscapes of U.S. Imperial Tehran and the Suburbs of Northern Virginia,” at the“Cities, Towns and Suburbs” conference of the Sawyer Mellon Seminar on Race, Space and Place in the America at the Rutgers University Center for Race and Ethnicity, in New Brunswick, N.J.

Professor of Anthropology Maris Gillette earned a European Institute for Advanced Studies grant and will be on a fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies during the 2013/2014 academic year. Gillette was also invited to give a paper at the Chinese Studies Colloquium at the University of Washington, and in the Islamic Studies workshop at Stanford University.

Assistant Professor of Spanish Aurelia Gómez presented a paper,“Los otros apandos: la narrativa carcelaria de José Revueltas y los presos políticos de la guerrilla en México” [The Other Punishment Cell: Prison Narratives of José Revueltas and The Political Prisoners of the Dirty War in Mexico], at Colloquium Act 29's“Literataturas e Culturas Em Portugal e Na América Hispánica: Novas Perspectivas em Diálogo,” which was organized by Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Facultade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, in Lisbon, Portugal, in April. She also presented a paper,“Perspectiva de género y guerrilla de los setenta en los testimonios Comparezco y acuso de Lourdes Uranga y Morir de sed junto a la fuente de Minerva Armendáriz” [Gender Perspective and the Mexican Guerrilla Warfare: the Written Testimonies by Lourdes Uranga and Minerva Armendáriz], at Tercer Congreso Internacional de Investigaciones Literarias, which was organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Lingüístico-literarias, Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico, in June.

Edmund and Margiana Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Professor of Anthropology Laurie Hart presented a paper on the repatriation after civil war in Bosnia and Greece, and chaired a panel at a European Social Research Council workshop organized in conjunction with the British School at Athens in May. Hart was also an invited discussant at the“Disasters and their Aftermaths” workshop organized by John Jackson and Deb Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania in April.

C.V. Starr Professor of Asian Studies and Associate Professor of Chinese and Linguistics Shizhe Huang presented a paper jointly written with Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley),“The Functional Architecture of Nominal Modification in Chinese and Thai,” at the 31st West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics at Arizona State University in Tempe, in February.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Danielle LaLonde presented a paper,“Literary Treaties: Failed Ritual Performance in Aeneid 12,” at the Brackenridge Classics Symposium“Change and Identity in Ancient Ritual and Poetry” at the University of Texas at San Antonio in March.

Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li has a show of her work, Ying Li /Eve Aschheim: Recent Paintings, on display at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture through the end of July. Her works are also part of a show, Creative Hand, Discerning Heart: Form, Rhythm, Song, at the James Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pa., through mid-September. Li is currently in the middle of a residential fellowship at Centro Incontri Umani Ascona in Switzerland, through August.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Brook Danielle Lillehaugen was awarded a Language Legacies grant from the Endangered Language Fund to support an introduction to linguistics workshop and mini-course for Zapotec community members. The course will be held in Oaxaca, Mexico, this summer.

Associate Professor of Music Thomas Lloyd had his concert-length“choral-theater” work Bonhoeffer premiered by the professional new-music choir The Crossing under the direction of Donald Nally at the Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral in March. In a review for The Philadelphia Inquirer, headlined“Premier of Bonhoeffer reveals an important work,” David Patrick Stearns wrote,“Sometimes you just don't see a significant piece coming… While it effectively airs many philosophical questions that keep your mind busy long after the performance, [Bonhoeffer] is never weighed down by them, and is rich in musical substance.”

Assistant Professor of Sociology Lisa McCormick was at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music for a guest residency,“Does the Music World Need Competitions?” Events included a guest lecture for Robert Winter's music history class, an informal discussion with graduate students and a public lecture.

Associate Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn presented the papers“Israel and Its Messianic Right: Path Dependency and Intentional Domestic Sovereignty Malpractice” and“Dominant Violent Non-State Groups in a Competitive Environment: Insights from Jewish and Palestinian Cases” at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, in April.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Weiwen Miao published  â€œProperties of Statistical Tests Appropriate for the Analysis of Data in Disparate Impact Cases” in the journal Law, Probability and Risk. Miao also attended the United States Conference on Teaching Statistics in Raleigh, N.C., in May.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Shannon Mudd organized a conference,“US Poverty, Microentreprenues and Microfinance,” in his role as coordinator of Haverford Mi3, the Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative. The conference, jointly sponsored with the department of economics, drew speakers from a highly regarded and diverse set of organizations focused on poverty, entrepreneurships and access to finance in the US, including major research organizations (Financial Access Initiative, Innovations for Poverty Action), industry support organizations (FIELD of the Aspen Institute, Association of Enterprise Opportunity) and area service providers (EntreprenuerWorks, Clarifi and Intersect Fund) as well as from the Federal Reserve Board of Philadelphia and Citi Foundation. The conference, held in March, drew over 60 attendees from campus and the local community. With both new research findings and reports from the field, the discussions were informative and provocative, providing insights about the financial issues faced by low-income households in the US and the organizations that are serving them.

Associate Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan published“Bad Scorpion: Cacemphaton and Poetics in Martial's Ligurinus Cycle” in the journal Classical World.

Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies John Muse exhibited his and Jeanne Finley's media installation Imperfect City / Imperfect State at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts. Muse also presented“Another Water, Another Punctum: Roni Horn, Roland Barthes” at“The Renaissance of Roland Barthes” conference at the City Univeristy of New York Graduate Center. And he and Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery Exhibtions Coordinator Matthew Callinan coordinated a conference panel,“Versus: Game Forms and Social Practice,” and they presented their exhibition, And the Winner is Nick Kahn, at the Open Engagement 2013 conference in Portland, Or.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist published a paper with Assistant Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier in the journal Crystal Growth & Design on some structural transformations in templated vanadium tellurites. Four Haverford undergraduates (now alumni) are listed as co-authors: Kelvin Chang '10, Ethan Glor '11, Sam Blau '12 and Matt Smith '13.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Deborah Roberts' translation of Euripides' Andromache appeared in the third edition of the Complete Greek Tragedies (University of Chicago Press), originally edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore and now fully revised by Mark Griffith and Glenn Most. Roberts also traveled to Warsaw, Poland, in May to take part (with the University of Pennsylvania's Sheila Murnaghan) in the conference“Our Mythical Childhood: Classics and Children's Literature Between East and West” at the University of Warsaw. Roberts and Murnaghan presented two collaboratively developed papers:“Warfare and the Construction of History in American Fictions of Ancient Rome for Children” and“Childhood, Mythology, and the Promise of Peace.”

Mellon Postdoc Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Zainab Saleh gave two talks in May:“After the Fall: Distorted Perceptions of Post-Saddam Iraq” at the Department and Program in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and“Iraq Ten Years On: From US Occupation to Systemized Sectarianism” at Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society. Saleh also published an article, "On Iraqi Nationality: Law, Citizenship, and Exclusion," in the spring 2013 issue of the Arab Studies Journal.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Independent College Programs Donovan Schaefer traveled to Toronto  in April for the annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, where he participated in the 12-person seminar“Burning the Thread: The Poetics of Digression,” where he presented an excerpt from his book manuscript,“Heavenbeast: Affect, Accident, and Animality in Joyce's Ulysses.” In the paper, he pushes Jacques Derrida's reading of Ulysses as a critique of metaphysics into conversation with Darwinian theory, suggesting that Ulysses illustrates bodies, language and thought in their animality, as accidents of evolutionary processes rather than rationally organized systems. Schaefer published an article,“Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism,” in Hypatia. The article, which argues for a new paradigm of atheism that was attentive to poststructuralist and feminist theoretical work on embodiment, draws heavily on a commencement address that feminist atheist Ursula K. LeGuin gave at Bryn Mawr College in 1986. Additionally, he published a long, invited review essay,“The Promise of Affect: Berlant's Cruel Optimism and Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness” in the June issue of the journal Theory and Event.

Associate Professor of French David Sedley gave a talk,“The Perspective of the Pascalian Agent,” at the annual Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in April.

Associate Professor of Anthropology Jesse Weaver Shipley published his book, Living the Hiplife: Celebrity and Entrepreneurship in Ghanaian Popular Music (Duke University Press). The book details the production, consumption and circulation of hiplife music, culture and fashion in relation to broader cultural and political shifts in Ghana.

Visiting Associate Professor of Independent College Programs Carol Solomon gave an invited talk in April on“Women Artists of the North African Diaspora” for the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies in Tangier, Morocco. Later that month, Solomon gave two lectures,“Graffiti and the Tunisian Revolution” and“Women Artists of North Africa and the North African Diaspora,” at Moulay Ismail University in Meknes, Morocco. She was also an invited speaker at the symposium“Les nouveaux contours de l'Orientalisme à l'international et dans les arts contemporains arabes …pour mieux les préciser et les redéfinir, à la lumière de leur histoire” at the 35ème Moussem Culturel International d'Assilah in Assilah, Morocco, where she gave the paper“Paradox and Ambiguity in the Orientalist Journey of Lalla Essaydi.”

Photographs by Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts William Williams appeared in the exhibition TURNING The TABLES: The Art of Curators & Directors, which ran through May 31 at the Santa Bannon/Fine Art gallery in Bethlehem, Pa.