Winter 2014 Faculty Update

Associate Professor of Economics Richard Ball hosted a two-day faculty development workshop on the Haverford campus, March 7 and 8, for a nationally recruited group of instructors of statistical methods courses in the social sciences. The workshop introduced participants to Project TIER, an initiative that Ball and Haverford Associate Librarian Norm Medeiros launched to promote teaching principles of replicability and documentation of statistical analysis in student research. Twelve participants from liberal arts colleges around the country attended the workshop, at which Ball and Medeiros demonstrated methods they have developed to teach responsible practices in empirical research to their students at Haverford.  In January, Ball gave conference presentations about Project TIER at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association in New Orleans and at the Midwinter Meetings of the American Library Association in Philadelphia (the latter was a joint presentation with Medeiros). In February, Ball spoke about Project TIER at a two-day workshop on“Robust Research in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences” at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va. This workshop was designed to generate advice to the NSF's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research on measures it can take to promote robust and replicable research in the social sciences.  For more information on Project TIER, see www.haverford.edu/TIER.

The music of Ruth Marshall Magill Professor Curt Cacioppo was performed in Italy at the Alpine Festival Zahrarmonie in Sauris, at the Goethe Institut in Palermo, and at the Desenzano Festival in Lake Garda, and his work“Luce è Donna” was selected for the finals of the Concorso Internazionale di Composizione Monodramma. Cacioppo's music was performed at Greenwich House in New York City, at Bryn Mawr College, in Philadelphia on the Flute Society of Greater Philadelphia series, at the Ojai Art Center in California, and at Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada. His orchestral work“Scenes from Indian Country” aired on WTUL, New Orleans, and his "Melodrama and Ayre" was heard over WMOR Provincetown. He completed a commissioned work for the Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli,“Armed and Dangerous,” based on the early renaissance song“L'homme armé,” and he was invited to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore to give a workshop for students in the contemporary piano repertoire class, who are preparing his work for performance.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Seth J. Gillihan gave an invited talk,“Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: How It Helps Depression & Anxiety,” at the 2013 annual conference of NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) in New Jersey in December.

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Hank Glassman was awarded the Anne Van Biema Fellowship for research in Japanese visual arts. He will spend May and June in Washington, D.C., at the Library of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian working on the history of graves and funeral rites in Japan's medieval period.

Associate Professor of Music Heidi Jacob's string quartet,“On Enameled Tablets,” was performed on Feb. 20 by the Momenta String Quartet in Brooklyn, N.Y, as part of Tania León's 2014 Composers Now Festival. Jacob's work for violin and piano, Winter Light was performed by violinist Miranda Cuckson on Feb. 23 in New York City as part of Las Americas en Concierto in conjunction with Composers Now Festival. Cuckson, a violinist and violist, has been called“a brilliant young performer who plays daunting contemporary music with insight, honesty, and temperament” (The New York Times) and“an artist to be reckoned with” (Gramophone).

Associate Professor of Physics Suzanne Amador Kane attended the American Physical Society's March Meeting in Denver, Colo., with undergraduate researchers Andrew Harvey Fulton '14, Lee Rosenthal '15, and Elliott Schwartz '14. Fulton gave a contributed talk (coauthored with Rosenthal and Kane) on“When Hawks Attack: Pursuit-Evasion, Perception and Raptor Hunting Strategies.” Schwartz was the lead author (with Rosenthal, Fulton, and Kane) on a poster presentation on“Birds on a Wire: Empirical Studies of Flocking Dynamics in Linear Aggregates.” Kane and her students also met up with Philip Drexler '14, who gave a talk on his research with University of Pennsylvania Professor Paulo Arratia on crater formation, and more than 11 other Haverford physics alumni attending the meeting as graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, physicists working in industry, and other professional scientists.

Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li was an invited speaker and critic at the Maryland Institute College of Art and at Western Connecticut State University's MFA Program. Her work was shown in the exhibitions In Residence: Contemporary Artists at Dartmouth, which runs through July 6 at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College; Still, Blue, Zeuxis at First Street Gallery, which ran through Jan. and Feb. at the First Street Gallery in New York City; and Paperazzi, An Invitational Show of Work on Paper, which ran in Jan. and Feb. at New York City's Janet Kurnatowski Gallery.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Brook Danielle Lillehaugen attended the annual meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, where she presented the paper“The Development of the Positional Verb System from Colonial to Modern Valley Zapotec,” which represents joint work done with John Foreman of the University of Texas, Pan American.

Associate Professor of Music Thomas Lloyd was featured in a ten-minute segment on WHYY's Friday Arts program. Called“Songs of Faith, Courage, and Consolation,” his segment was tied to a concert program he designed and conducted with the Bucks County Choral Society focusing on the history of the African-American spiritual. The segment was rebroadcast twice a week between January and March 2014. Lloyd was also one of only 60 composers to be awarded a New Music USA project grant from a field of 1,618 proposals related to music for orchestra, choir, chamber music, opera, dance, and theater. The grant is for the production of a commercial recording of his recently premiered choral-theater work, Bonhoeffer, by the internationally acclaimed professional chamber choir, The Crossing, under the direction of Donald Nally.

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth gave two invited lectures at the Institute for Philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City in February. Both lectures addressed“Reasoning in Mathematics.” The first was on ancient and early modern mathematical practice, the second was on contemporary mathematical practice.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Lisa McCormick presented a paper,“Death's Playlist: Music at Contemporary Funerals,” at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Md., in February.

Associate Professor of English Maud McInerney delivered the keynote address at the February Medievalists at Penn 6th Graduate Student Conference on“Visions of Empire” in February.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Joshua Sabloff gave a seminar talk at the University of Virginia,“Topologically Distinct Lagrangian Fillings and the Generating Family Homology Number,” which was based on work done with Chang Cao '13, Nate Gallup '13, and Kyle Hayden '13.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion and Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow Donovan Schaefer was interviewed for an article and video segment about American enthusiasm for guns in the wake of the Newtown tragedy on Voice of America. He also published“Our Peculiar Institution: 12 Years a Slave, American Protestantism, and the Erotics of Racism” in The Bulletin for the Study of Religion and“Blessed, Precious Mistakes: Evolution, Deconstruction, and the American New Atheism” in The International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.

Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Wright published an online review of Dennis J. Schmidt's book, Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (Indiana University Press, 2013), in the Feb. 27 issue of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.