Summer 2019 Faculty Updates

Professor of Fine Arts Markus Baenziger had his work included in the exhibit A Time for Farewells, curated by Premjish Achari, at the Shrine Empire Gallery in New Delhi, India. He spoke on a panel discussion there as part of the exhibit’s opening, and it received positive press from The Indian Express and Critical Collective.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Laura Been attended the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology annual meeting in Bloomington, Ind. There, she gave a research talk and spoke on two professional development panels, and her student Alissa Valentine '19 presented a poster about her senior thesis research. Been also published a chapter on "Dopamine" in the Encyclopedia of Sexuality and Gender (Springer), edited by Amy Lykins.

Assistant Professor of Economics Carola Binder presented "Political Pressure on Central Banks" at the National Bureau of Economics Research Summer Institute in Cambridge, Mass. She was a discussant at the Norges Bank Conference on commodity prices and monetary policy in Oslo, Norway, and an invited speaker at the annual conference of the Bank of Guatemala, where she spoke about expectations in monetary policy and participated in a panel discussion moderated by the president of the central bank. Binder also gave a seminar on "Central Bank Communication and Disagreement about the Natural Rate" at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C. Her recent publications include "Comment on 'Central Bank Announcements: Big News for Little People?' by Michael Lamla and Dmitri Vinogradov," which was published in Journal of Monetary Economics and "Thinking Outside the Box: Do SPF Respondents Have Anchored Inflation Expectations?" which was published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Working Paper series.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo received a commission from Italian harpist Paola Perrucci for a new piece, which he completed, based on the Sicilian legend of Colapesce. He also fulfilled a commission from the Tchaikovsky Center for Musical Culture in St. Petersburg, Russia, completing his Neva Fantasy (Nevskaya Fantaziya/Невская Фантазия) for violin and piano. His Trio for Violin, Horn and Piano received its world premiere, as did his Walt Whitman bicentennial setting (I, madly struggling, cry). His Contrapuntal Fantasy on John Newton’s “Amazing Grace” was performed at the Center for the Arts in Winnsboro, Texas, along with his Native American-inspired prelude, Bluebird Sings Goodnight.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Jane Chandlee presented two talks at the Mathematics of Language Conference at the University of Toronto in July: "Quantifier-free least fixed point functions for phonology" (co-authored with Adam Jardine of Rutgers University) and "Learning with partially ordered representations” (co-authored with Remi Eyraud of Aix-Marseille University, Jeffrey Heinz of Stony Brook University, Adam Jardine of Rutgers University, and Jonathan Rawski of Stony Brook University). Chandlee was also awarded an NSF grant to fund a workshop on formal language theory in linguistics, to be held during the Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America January 2020 in New Orleans.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian ’03 was awarded a five-year $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the expansion of "Failure as part of Learning, A Mindset Education Network" (FLAMEnet) with collaborators Lisa Corwin (University of Colorado Boulder) and Jen Heemstra (Emory University). This network brings together STEM instructors, educational researchers, and psychologists to coordinate diversity and inclusivity efforts focused on growth mindset and student response to challenge, failure, and ambiguity. The network, which includes Professor of Psychology Ben Le on the leadership team, plans to develop modules that can be plugged into courses and disseminated across a range of institutional types and disciplines. Charkoudian was also a recipient of the 2019 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. This award supports the research and teaching careers of talented faculty in the chemical sciences at undergraduate institutions. She received a $25,000 grant from the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative Award, Research Corporation for Science Advancement for “Establishing a Network for Effective Interventions in STEM Classrooms” with Kerstin Perez (MIT) and ten other Cottrell Scholars. She also gave an invited talk at the University of Oslo.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Daniel Grin attended the Gordon Research Conference in String Theory and Cosmology in Casteldefells, Spain, where he gave a poster presentation on long-wave length modulations of the cosmic microwave background from new fundamental physics. Grin was also invited to speak at at the CosmoGold conference, hosted by the Institut Astrophysique de Paris, where he gave a presentation on microwave background constraints to dark matter particle physics, with a focus on axions (a hypothetical new fundamental particle). He and four of his students attended the Undergraduate Cosmology Conference at MIT, at which they all gave talks on their research and benefited from interactions with undergraduate cosmology researchers from Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of New Hampshire, Kenyon College, and Swarthmore College.

Executive Director of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Eric Hartman was a short-term visiting professor at the University of Ottawa School of International Development and Global Studies. Hartman was a keynote speaker at the International Symposium on Global Community Engaged-Learning, which was hosted by Adanu and Michigan State University in Ho, Ghana. He was also co-convener and facilitator of the Midwest Institute on Community-Campus Partnerships for Global Learning and Human Rights at the University of Dayton.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual Studies Emily Hong’s two-channel video installation, “For My Art,” was exhibited at the San José Museum of Art as part of Screen Acts: Women in Film and Video. Hong was also awarded two grants from the Tribeca Film Institute and the Bertha Foundation for her current feature film project, Above and Below The Ground.

Associate Professor of Linguistics Brook Lillehaugen received a $2,000 Language Legacies Grant from the Endangered Language Fund for her project with Felipe H. Lopez, “Documenting endangered cultural knowledge in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec.” Lillehaugen and Lopez gave an invited talk with Aurora Sánchez Gómez, Moisés García Guzmán, and Chantal Reyes (Swarthmore ’22) on “Diccionarios parlantes del zapoteco del Valle de Tlacolula” at Defensoría de los Derechos Humanos del Pueblo de Oaxaca in Oaxaca City.

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth presented two invited papers: "Meaning, Normatively, and Sociality" at the Fourth Mid-Atlantic Philosophy of Language Workshop at the University of West Virginia, Morgantown, and "The Nyāya Five-Step Argument Scheme: A Reading" at the conference Learning from Buddhist Logic: A Cross-Cultural Workshop at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karen Masters published a paper, "H I-MaNGA: H I follow-up for the MaNGA survey," in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This publication describes a program of observations using the Green Bank Radio Telescope in West Virginia to measure the neutral hydrogen 21cm. line emission in an optical survey of galaxies (called "MaNGA") that Masters has been leading for a number of years now. A number of students contributed to data reduction, including Haverford astronomy major Emily Harrington BMC '20 and astrophysics major Shoaib Shami '21. Dave Stark, who is joining Masters’ lab as a research associate next month, was a co-author. 

Professor Emeritus of Biology Philip Meneely co-authored an invited paper, "Working with Worms: Caenorhabtitis elegans as a Model Organism," for Current Protocols: Essential Laboratory Techniques, published in August. His co-authors were his former student Caroline (Lina) Dahlberg ’01 and Jacqueline Rose, both of Western Washington University. It is a detailed tutorial for students and faculty members who want to learn to work with C. elegans in the lab.

Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Weiwen Miao attended the Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver, Colo.

Associate Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan worked with students to launch Bridge Tools, a free lemmatization tool for Latin and Greek texts, and to significantly expand the texts available on The Bridge. Mulligan also published an article, “Ennodius,” in the Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, delivered a talk on "Crowdsourcing Open Educational Resources for Classics" at the Annual Meeting of the American Classical League, and led the week-long Dickinson Summer Latin Workshop 2019 on Martial's Epigrams.

Associate Professor of Political Science Zachary Oberfield published “Parent Engagement and Satisfaction in Public Charter and District Schools” in the American Educational Research Journal. He published two book chapters: one on “Discretion From a Sociological Perspective” in Discretion and the Quest for Controlled Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan), edited by Tony Evans and Peter Hupe, and another on “The Social Context of Charter Schools” in the Handbook of Research on School Choice (Routledge), edited by Mark Berends, Ann Primus, and Matthew Springer. Oberfield also gave a paper, “Race and Ability Discrimination in Public District and Charter High Schools, ” with Matthew Incantalupo (Yeshiva University) at the Public Management Research Conference.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor and Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Deborah Roberts chaired a session on "Gendering Classical Mythology for Children" at the joint conference of the Fédération internationale des associations d'études classiques and the Classical Association of the U.K., held in London in July.

Visiting Professor of Independent College Programs and Health Studies Carol Schilling wrote a chapter, “Elegy for Iris,” in Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Other Personal Narratives (Macmillan Reference), a two-volume reference on life writing about disability edited by G. Thomas Couser and Susannah B. Mintz. The chapter covers John Bayley's memoir about caring for his wife, philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

Associate Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Jill Stauffer gave an invited talk, “‘Truth is in multiple times’: Levinas, skepticism, and decolonizing reason,” at the Swarthmore Philosophy Colloquium. She ran two text seminars: a weeklong one on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon at Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Italy, and one on "Skepticism in Otherwise than Being" at Levinas Research Seminar in Montreal, Quebec. Stauffer was also interviewed about her book, Ethical Loneliness, for the New Books in Philosophy podcast on the New Books Network. 

Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies David Harrington Watt presented a paper, “Can We Be Certain that Rufus Jones Was a Eugenicist?” at a conference in Birmingham, England, sponsored by the Quaker Studies Research Association. He also published “The Politics of ‘Quakers Values” in Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Conference on Religion and American Culture, which was edited by Philip Goff, Lauren Schmidt, and Nate Wynne and published by IUPUI's Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture.

Assistant Professor of Health Studies Anna West presented a paper, "Signposting Sanitary Citizenship: Border-making and Bounded Subjectivities in a Malawian Hygiene Promotion Campaign," at the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes’ Health Humanities Summer Institute in Paris.

Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts William Williams had two of his photographs included in the African American Museum of Philadelphia’s exhibit AAMP on Paper: Selections from the Permanent Collection alongside drawings, photography, paintings and prints from 20th century masters such as Elizabeth Catlett, Paul Keane, Hughie Lee Smith, Dox Thrash, and Hale Woodruff.

Associate Professor of Political Science Susanna Wing was interviewed by BBC’s Newsday on the crisis in Mali. She also wrote an article for The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog about the escalating ethnic violence in Mali.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing Rosetta Young published a paper, “'The Spirits of all Three Shall Strive Within Me': Bourdieuan Multiform Capital and Dickensian Characterization,” in the journal Studies in the Novel. Young also published “'A Fucking Jane Austen Novel': An Alternative Popular Culture Legacy,” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

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