Winter 2012 Faculty Updates

Associate Professor of Physics Suzanne Amador Kane published“A biophysical model of prokaryotic diversity in geothermal hot springs” in Physical Review E with co-authors Anna Klales '09, James Duncan '03 and Elizabeth Janus Nett '04. She also attended and gave a presentation at the early January NEXUS-HHMI workshop at the University of Maryland on recent changes in premedical student education.

Associate Professor of Economics Richard Ball co-authored a paper,“Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research: A Protocol for Documenting Data Management and Analysis,” with Associate Librarian of the College and Coordinator for Bibliographic and Digital Services Norm Medeiros for the spring 2012 edition of the Journal of Economic Education. Ball presented an earlier version of this paper at the American Economic Association's Conference on Teaching Economics and Economic Research at Stanford University last June.

Visiting Instructor of Music and Supervisor of the Keyboard Studies Program Christine Cacioppo published her anthology, Treasures from the Piano Bench. This is Volume I of a two-volume pedagogical repertoire series of works, which she has selected, arranged and critically edited. Samples from the publication may be viewed here.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo's work Kinaaldá: the Rite of Changing Woman was given its East Coast premiere at the Curtis Institute of Music on a Philadelphia Chamber Music Society concert featuring the Borromeo String Quartet. His Philadelphia Diary was performed by pianist Althea Waites on an African Heritage Month“Music Untold” series concert at the Long Beach Public Library in California. He himself performed Charles Cacioppo's Klavierstück III on a concert at Cornell University. His music was featured on KUSC's Arts Alive program, and several major works were broadcast multiple times on KUAZ (Arizona), WRTI (Philadelphia) and WOMR (Provincetown). Gramophone cited his di cibo celeste as“an expansive narrative that treats a theme sung by Mozart's Commendatore to imposing transformations and a panoply of instrumental colors.”

Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Devaney was the featured guest on the Poetry Foundation's radio program and podcast PoemTalk. The episode,“Ill Angelic Poetics: On Edgar Allan Poe's ‘Dream-Land,' ” is available here. In February, he was commissioned by the Pew Foundation's Center for Arts & Heritage to write the text for a book to be published as part of its“Shelf Life” project. Also, Devaney's critical essay,“Inverting the Middle: Turning Points in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Drafts,” appeared in Jacket2 in December, and his poem,“The Blue Stoop,” was published in BOMB Magazine's“Word Choice” with a photograph by Zoe Strauss.

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Hank Glassman's new book, The Face of Jizô: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism (University of Hawaii Press) appeared in January. He also gave one invited talk,“The Cult of Jizô: A Buddhist Deity in Medieval Japan,” at Smith College in March, and another,“At the Crossroads of the Six Paths: Images and Legends of the Bodhisattva Jizô from Kyoto's Rokuharamitsuji,” at Stanford University in December. Glassman also spoke at“Japanese Buddhism and the Performing Arts (geinô),” an international, multidisciplinary conference held at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Japanese Religions in October and at the interdisciplinary, international conference,“Lovabale Losers: The Taira in Action and Memory,” in Banff, Canada, in August. Additionally, he presented  â€œPlaying on that Liminal Shore: the segakie and the birth of sai no kawara” at the conference“The One Who is Really Lost: A Conference in Honor of William R. LaFleur,” at the University of Pennsylvania in September.

Visiting Associate Professor of Spanish Ariana Huberman attended the Association for Jewish Studies' 43rd Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., in December where she gave a paper,“Kabbalistic Cosmogony and the Latin American Labyrinth in Mario Satz's Writings,” and organized a panel on Current Approaches to Cultural Studies in Jewish Latin America.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Danielle LaLonde presented a paper,“Tarpeia's Peace Treaty in Propertius 4.4,” at the Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association in Philadelphia in January.

Professor of Anthropology Emeritus Wyatt MacGaffey published“Kongo slavery remembered by themselves: texts from 1915” in International Journal of African Historical Studies;“The blacksmiths of Tamale: dynamics of space and time in a Ghanaian industry” in Africa, the Journal of the International African Institute; and“The residue of colonial anthropology in the history and political discourse of Northern Ghana” in History Compass.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn presented a paper,“Ideological Entrepreneurs and Challenged State Authority: The Israeli State and Violent Jewish Non-State Actors,” at the annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association in December. Mendelsohn also gave a talk,“Al Qaeda and Global Governance: Ideology Rigidness and Propaganda Strategy,” at Cornell University's Reppy Institute Seminar in February.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Weiwen Miao published a paper,“Some Important Statistical Issues Courts Should Consider in Their Assessment of Statistical Analyses Submitted in Class Certification Motions: Implications for Dukes v. Wal-mart,” in Law, Probability and Risk in September.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist published a paper,“Synthesis, crystal structures and thermal behavior of organic-inorganic hybrids incorporating a chiral diamine,” in the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry.

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Deborah Roberts' translation of Aeschylus' tragedy Prometheus Bound was published by Hackett.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier presented the talk,“Thermally-driven Isotope Separation Across Nanoporous Graphene,” at the American Physical Society Meeting in February. He also published the paper,“Thermally-driven isotope separation across nanoporous graphene,” which was co-authored with James McClain '11, in Chemical Physics Letters, and published“Fluorinated and Nanoporous Graphene Materials As Sorbents for Gas Separations” in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. Additionally, Schrier was awarded supercomputer time at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Initiative for Scientific Exploration. Of the 22 allocations that were made, Haverford is the only non-R1, non-National Laboratory recipient. The 0.5 million CPU hours awarded are in addition to the 0.45 million hours Schrier received earlier in the year.

Visiting Associate Professor of Art History Carol Solomon chaired a session,“About Gardens and Gardening,” in the“Natural History in Post Revolutionary and Restoration France” symposium at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in December.

Associate Professor of English Gustavus Stadler gave two invited talks this winter:“Sound, Recording, and the Warhol Sensorium” at Bowdoin College, sponsored by the English, History of Art, and Gay and Lesbian Studies departments; and“Andy/Bartleby” at the Pomona College symposium“As Yet Unnamed: Queer Theory and 19th-Century American Literature.”

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Peace, Justice and Human Rights Concentration Jill Stauffer gave an invited presentation,“Ethical Loneliness: Forgiveness, Resentment and Recovery in Law,” at the WGS Workshop on Law and Loss at Johns Hopkins University. Stauffer also gave an invited paper,“A Hearing: Forgiveness, Resentment and Recovery in Law,” at a law symposium at Quinnipiac School of Law in New Haven, Conn. She also circulated a paper and then gave a presentation,“Speaking Truth to Reconciliation: Forgiveness, Resentment, Human Rights,” at the Human Rights Workshop at Yale Law School.

Professor of Psychology and Associate Provost Wendy Sternberg gave a talk at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., in November, describing the results of a study conducted with Emily Steiner '12. Steiner worked on the project as part of an independent study in spring 2011 with alumnus Patrick Gleeson '09, who worked in the lab as a laboratory technician. Sternberg was also a co-author on a major collaborative investigation on genetic mediation of a stress-pain interaction in mice and humans, which was published in Nature Neuroscience in October.

Assistant Professor of Astronomy Beth Willman visited the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; the Herzberg Institute for Astronomy in Victoria Canada; the Las Cumbres Observatory; Tufts University; Columbia University; and UCLA to present invited seminars and colloquia on the least luminous galaxies in the universe and the question“What is a Galaxy?” She gave an invited review talk on the same topic for the“First Light and Faintest Dwarfs” conference at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara.

Assistant Professor of Religion Travis Zadeh's second book, The Vernacular Qur'an: Translation and the Rise of Persian Exegesis (Oxford University Press) was published in February. Read more about it here.