Winter 2013 Faculty Update

Associate Professor of Physics Susanne Amador Kane gave the annual Nina Hillman Lecture at Temple University's Biology Department in October.

Professor of Mathematics Lynne Butler presented the research for her masters thesis in statistics at the University of Chicago on Dec. 19 in the talk“Topics and Themes in a Corpus of Prayers: An Application of Latent Dirichlet Allocation.” Direction of the senior thesis work of Rebecca Knowles '12 introduced Butler to LDA, the hierarchical Bayesian model she used to discover a mixture of six themes for each of 346 Baha'i prayers.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo's“Impressions of Venice” from his Navona Records album ITALIA was broadcast on Feb. 19, on the program The Latest Score, which is hosted by Canary Burton on WOMR-FM 92.1, Provincetown, Mass. Pianist Monica Jakuc Leverett discussed and performed Cacioppo's“Pawnee Preludes” in a recital at Smith College on Feb. 19. Cacioppo was featured on Composers Circle online on Dec. 26 in a post now archived, and is represented on Thomas Hampson's Song of America website. His orchestral piece“Invocation and Dance of the Mountain Gods” was selected by Parma Recordings for inclusion on the label's online digital release Fine Music, Vol. 4, to be launched May 7. Several online reviews have commended his CD, Laws of the Pipe, including Kathodik in Italy, which described Cacioppo's compositions as“deeply evocative music, full of pathos at once archaic and modern.”

Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature Roberto Castillo Sandoval was awarded the 2013 Creativity in Writing Grant for Professional Authors by the Chilean National Council For Culture and the Arts. The grant funded completion of his volume of short fiction pieces, The Deadman's Farewell: Mortuory Chronicles.

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Hank Glassman gave a talk,“The Creation of a Children's Limbo in Late Medieval Kyoto: sai no kawara, the Five-Element Pagoda, and the Collective Dead,” at the Center for Japanese Religions at the University of Southern California in November. Glassman also gave an invited research talk,“The Five-Element Pagoda (gorintô) and Changing Concepts of the Dead in Medieval Japan: A Visual Exploration,” at the University of Michigan's Center for Japanese Studies and Department of Art History in October, and he presented“The Five-Element Pagoda and sai no kawara: Jizo, the Bodhisattva of the Marginal” in Japanese at the international conference on“Religion in East Asian: Cultural Flows and Exchange,” hosted in Kyoto and the mountains of Kumano by the National Museum of Japanese History.

Assistant Professor of Spanish Aurelia Gómez published“And They Didn't Shut Up: Prison Narratives of the Mexican Dirty War” in A Contracorriente. A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America in January. Gómez also presented a paper,“Entrecruzamientos de la memoria. La narrativa de Francisco Pérez Arce y la guerra sucia de los setenta en México,” at XVIII Conference of Contemporary Mexican Literature at the University of Texas at El Paso in March. That paper discusses how state violence and the memory of the Dirty War in Mexico is represented in the novels Hotel Balmori and Septiembre by Francisco Pérez Arce.

John Whitehead Professor of Philosophy Emeritus Aryeh Kosman published The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology with Harvard University Press in March.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Brook Danielle Lillehaugen co-edited (with Aaron H. Sonnenschein) Expressing Location in Zapotec, which was published by Lincom Europa, and co-authored the introduction to that volume. Lillehaugen also presented two conference papers at the First International Conference on Mesoamerican Linguistics in Fullerton, Calif.:“Building an electronic database for Colonial Valley Zapotec” (co-authored with George Aaron Broadwell) and“A first look at positional verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec” (co-authored with John Foreman). In addition, Lillehaugen accompanied the CPGC Migration Field Study Tour to Mexico City over winter break.

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth gave a keynote address,“The Puzzle of Logic in Relation to Mathematics,” at the inaugural meeting of the Philosophy of Mathematics Association at the University of Notre Dame in October. Macbeth also gave two invited lectures:“Logic Through Its History,” at the meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, and“Logical Form in Mathematical Practice,” at the meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy. Both meetings were held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association Central Meeting, which was held in New Orleans in February. Additionally, Macbeth's paper  â€œWriting Reason” appeared in the journal Logique et Analyse.

Associate Professor of Political Science Stephen McGovern published“Ambivalence over Participatory Planning within a Progressive Regime: Waterfront Planning in Philadelphia” in The Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist published a paper with some collaborators in Crystal Growth & Design that describes the construction of polar solid state materials from racemic building units.

Elizabeth Ufford Green Professor in the Natural Sciences and Professor of Biology Judith Owen and Professor of Biology Jennifer Punt co-authored the seventh edition of Kuby's Immunology, a textbook published by WH Freeman, with Mt Holoyoke's Sharon Stranford and contributing author Pat Jones of Stanford.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish Marla Pagan-Mattos presented a paper,“Imitation, Example, Exception: Retracing San Millan from Berceo back to Saint Braulius of Zaragoza,” at the conference“Thinking with Cervantes: Exemplarity and the Potential to Be Otherwise.” The conference, which took place at the University of Pennsylvania in February, was organized on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes' Novelas Ejemplares.

Professor of Astronomy Emeritus Bruce Partridge gave a brief report in January on work he and Ben Walter '13 have been doing on the absolute calibration of radio astronomy observations. In February, Partridge gave a summary talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, covering some of the first results from the European Space Agency's Planck mission, mainly studies of radio galaxies and of the interstellar gas in our own Milky Way galaxy.

Professor of Chemistry Rob Scarrow presented a poster, co-authored with three students, at the Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference in Ventura, Calif., in January. This small conference of 160 conferees was also attended by three Haverford alumni: Steve Lippard '62, Reza Ghiladi '95 and Matt Sazinsky '99.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Independent College Programs Donovan Schaefer, along with Syracuse University Professor of Religion M. Gail Hamner, successfully proposed a new program unit on Religion, Affect and Emotion through the American Academy of Religion. This program unit creates a space for new conversations to take place in the AAR, specifically conversations that draw on resources from the emerging field of affect theory, the subject of the 2012-2013 HCAH faculty seminar, and explore their relevance for religious studies.

Visiting Professor of Writing and Independent College Programs Carol Schilling recently published two book reviews: one on Catherine Belling's A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria in Literature and Medicine 30, and one on Ann Jurecic's Illness as Narrative on the Literature, Arts, and Medicine medical humanities website of New York University.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier gave talks at Harvard University, Clark University, San Francisco State University and Wesleyan University. He also co-authored a paper,“Noble Gas Separation using PG-ES X( X= 1, 2, 3) Nanoporous Two-Dimensional Polymers,” with Anna Brockway '12 in The Journal of Physical Chemistry C.

Visiting Associate Professor of Art History Carol Solomon was an invited speaker at the International Festival of Contemporary Art at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Algiers, Algeria. The theme of the conference, which ran from Dec. 11 through 15, was“Art and Political Engagement.”  Solomon was the only American scholar in attendance. Others were from Algeria, Tunisia, Mali, Cuba, France, Spain, Italy and Syria. Solomon's paper was entitled“The Vicissitudes of a Photographic Icon: Accidental Napalm, 1972.” Additionally, Solomon presented a paper,“Contemporary Art of the Maghreb,” at the Fulbright Scholar Enrichment Seminar on March 3 in Cairo, Egypt, and gave a talk,“Les Artistes de la Médina et la question d'identité,” at the Moroccan-American Friendship Foundation in Tangier, Morocco, on March 16.

Associate Professor of English Gustavus Stadler delivered a lecture,“Woody Guthrie Called Queer,” at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities on Feb. 14 and at an event sponsored by the Binghamton University Sound Studies Collective on Feb. 15.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Peace, Justice and Human Rights Concentration Jill Stauffer published an essay,“Speaking Truth to Reconciliation: Political Transition, Recovery and the Work of Time,” in the March 2013 issue of Humanity.

Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts and Curator of Photography Willie Williams attended the ORACLE International Conference of Photography Curators in Madrid, Spain, in November 2013. Williams also published a book review,“A Very Fine Appearance: The Vermont Photographs of George Houghton,” in Vermont History. His photographs of Underground Railroad sites were included in the group exhibition, 40 Artists /40 Years: Selections from the Light Work Collection, at the Louise and Bernard Palitz Gallery, which is on view through April 11. Williams wrote the text for the brochure for the exhibit Walker Evans & The American Landscape Photographers at the Allentown Art Museum, and a photograph of his is written about and appears in the book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, which was published by Temple University Press. Additionally, his photos were included in the exhibition Visualizing Emancipation at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and he was a panelist on a visual arts panel at the National Endowment for the Arts on Dec. 7.

Associate Professor of Political Science Susanna Wing gave an invited talk,“Crisis in Mali: Causes and Options,” at the United States Institute of Peace on Dec. 18. Wing spoke at another conference,“Salifism in North and Sub-Saharan Africa,” at the U.S. State Department on Dec. 7. She was an invited roundtable speaker at“Islamic Militancy and Foreign Intervention” at the University of Pennsylvania's Africa Center on Feb. 27, and gave a talk,“Crisis in Mali and North Africa,” at the Africa Policy Dialogue on the Hill, sponsored by The Brookings Institution, on Feb. 21. Wing also published“Making Sense of Mali: The Real Stakes of the War Rocking West Africa” in Foreign Affairs. Additionally, she has made many media appearances to talk about the recent conflict in Mali. Since Dec. 2012, she has given interviews to Al Jazeera English, Sanlian Lifeweek, France 24, Radio France International, NPR's Talk of the Nation, WBEZ Chicago's The World View, Sirius XM's The Morning Briefing, Wall Street Journal Radio's The Daily Wrap, BBC World Service's World Have Your Say, The Telegraph, The Toronto Star, La Presse, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and USA Today.