Winter 2017 Faculty Update

Associate Professor of Fine Arts Markus Baenziger was included in a group show, Regrouping, at the Edward Thorp Gallery in New York. The exhibit ran from December 15 through January 28.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing Anne Balay published a review of Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music by Nadine Hubbs in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. Balay also published "Sex and Surveillance on the Highway" in this spring 2017 issue of Trans Studies Quarterly.

Associate Professor of Economics Richard Ball published a paper, "Violations of monotonicity in evolutionary models with sample-based beliefs," in Economics Letters and a cartoon and limerick, "Antiisomorphisms in Classical Hypothesis Testing and Children’s Literature," in Chance: A magazine of the American Statistical Association. At a conference on "The Gold Standard of Reproducible Research" at the University of Nottingham, in the U.K., he led a training session for graduate students on "Making Replication Documentation Useful: Purposes, Principles and Practices" and was a panelist in a discussion of how standards of research transparency and reproducibility can be strengthened across the social sciences.  He also organized, in collaboration with his Project TIER colleagues and Occidental College staff, a full-day faculty development workshop on teaching reproducible research methods at Occidental's Center for Digital Liberal Arts.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Laura Been published "Using a Pop-Science Book to Teach Introductory Neuroscience: Advantages for Science Majors and Non-Science Majors Alike" in
The Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education.

College President and Francis B. Gummere Professor of English Kimberly Benston published "Harper and Trane: Modal Enactments of A Love Supreme," in the Journal of Ethnic American Literature.

Assistant Professor of Economics Carola Binder presented "Interest Rate Prominence in Consumer Decision-making" at Loyola University Maryland in February, and published "Interest-Rate Neglect Among Millennials Could Bring Monetary Policy Challenges" in International Banker in March. Binder, who is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, maintains a blog, Quantitative Ease, that was selected as one of the "Top Economics and Finance Blogs of 2017” by FocusEconomics.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo’s Elegy was performed by Italian violinist Francesco D’Orazio at Haverford, the San Francisco Italian Cultural Institute, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and at Constellations in Chicago. Pianist May Phang gave the Michigan premiere of Cacioppo’s Ostinato-Fantasia on "All Creatures of our God and King"  at Western Michigan University. The Orpheus Duo gave the world premiere of Cacioppo’s Stories from the 7th Ward in Long Beach, CA.  The Quartetto di Venezia, in collaboration with Cacioppo as pianist, gave a retrospective concert of his music at the Auditorium Lo Squero in Venice, Italy. The program included Impressioni venexiane, Divertimenti in Italia, Ecco Venere, and Women at the Cross.  The ensemble performed Women at the Cross with him subsequently at Goucher College on its U.S. tour. Chamber orchestra First Editions gave the world premiere and a repeat performance of Cacioppo’s A Meeting of Souls at Haverford and in Philadelphia. His music was broadcast on WWFM in N.J., and WRTI in Philadelphia. He also completed a major work, Piano Variations on "Hail to the Chief."

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian '03 was awarded a $560,681 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to support her work on accessing chemical diversity through the characterization and redesign of natural product synthases. Charkoudian also published a manuscript, "Utilizing Mechanistic Cross-Linking Technology To Study Protein-Protein Interactions: An Experiment Designed for an Undergraduate Biochemistry Lab," in The Journal of Chemical Education.

Lecturer in Education Heather Curl '03 was invited to give a talk, "Cultural Conflict: The Implications of Changing Dispositions among the Upwardly Mobile," with co-authors Annette Lareau and Tina Wu, at the Conference on College and Social Mobility organized by the Education and Inequality Cluster of the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania.

Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Devaney hosted poet Sparrow on campus, sponsored by the English Department and the Hurford Center. His essay "Enduring Voices: The Legacy of Nat Hentoff" was published at Hyperallergic and his article "In Paterson, a snippet of the poet's life" was published in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Devaney was a featured participant in the Philadelphia #WritersResist: United for Liberty event at the National Museum of American Jewish History. He was also a featured reader at the Boog City Poetry, Music, Theater, and Film Festival at Unnamable Books in Brooklyn.

Associate Professor of Computer Science John Dougherty presented a reviewed paper on how to use song and video to introduce computing algorithms at the 48th annual Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Technical Symposium, Seattle, Wash. This project was conducted, and report written, with Ben Schreiber (Swarthmore '16). In conjunction with the conference, Dougherty also gave a more informal presentation about using Panopto and Moodle as "quick and easy" tools to support universal design in learning.

Assistant Professor of Religion Molly Farneth presented a paper, "Racial Domination and the Conditions for the Possibility of Reconciliation," at the Society of Jewish Ethics Annual Meeting in New Orleans in January. She also published three articles: "'The Power to Empty Oneself': Hegel, Kenosis, and Intellectual Virtue," in Political Theology, "Feminist Jewish Thought as Postliberal Theology" in Modern Theology, and "Endure or Resist?: A Review of John R. Bowlin’s Tolerance Among the Virtues" in Commonweal Magazine. Farneth also published a chapter, "G.W.F. Hegel" in the book Religion and European Philosophy: Key Thinkers from Kant to Žižek, edited by Philip Goodchild and Hollis Phelps (Routledge, 2017).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Christina Freeman worked with the internationally recognized Lower East Side collective ABC No Rio, as well as artists from the Flux Factory residency to develop the process-based, collaborative exhibition, Against Competition/Towards Mutual Aid. Based on an essay by artist Marc Fischer, the exhibition sought to create a dialogue around an alternative to the traditional, competitive atmosphere of art production and exhibition. The exhibition opened to the public on February 8, at Flux Factory in Long Island City, and was listed in Art F City as one of the "Must-See Art Events in New York" for that week. Freeman was also invited to speak about the exhibition to a Eugene Lang, New School class on "New York City's Alternative Spaces."

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sorelle Friedler presented "Auditing Black-box Models for Indirect Influence" at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining in Barcelona in December. The paper was co-authored with three members of the class of 2016 (Casey Falk, Gabe Rybeck, and Brandon Smith), as well as collaborators Philip Adler, Carlos Scheidegger, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian.

Associate Professor of History Andrew Friedman published the "Author's Response" in the book review symposium on his book, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia, in the April 2017 issue of the journal Progress in Human Geography. He also published a review, "Empire on the Mississippi," in the January 2017 issue of the journal Diplomatic History.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Heidi Goodson published an article, "Hypergeometric Functions and Relations to Dwork Hypersurfaces," in The International Journal of Number Theory. She also gave research presentations at the Mid-Atlantic Seminar on Numbers at Towson University, the AMS/MAA Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta, and the Philadelphia Area Number Theory Seminar at Bryn Mawr College.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Daniel Grin gave parallel session presentations on "Testing the ultra-light axion hypothesis with CMB-SIV" and "Astrophysics for Older Adults in Chicago" at the American Astronomical Society Conference in Grapevine, Texas, in January. At that conference he also gave a repeat of his presentation to the NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellows Forum. Grin gave presentations at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton ("Perturbations are no spectator sport") and Villanova's Physics and Astronomy Seminar ("Looking for ultra-light particles using the cosmic microwave background and galaxy clustering"). He was also awarded the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Scholars grant to fund summer research as a visitor at University of California, Santa Barbara over a period of three years.

Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate and Visiting Assistant Professor of Astronomy Alex Hill published two papers about interstellar gas and magnetic fields in spiral arms of our Milky Way galaxy: "The Fan Region at 1.5 GHz: Polarized synchrotron emission extending beyond the Perseus Arm" in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and, as a coauthor, "Warm Ionized Medium Throughout the Sagittarius-Carina Arm" in The Astrophysical Journal.

CV Starr Professor of Asian Studies and Associate Professor of Chinese and Linguistics Shizhe Huang gave an invited talk, "Referential Indefinites in Chinese," at Hunan University in China, in March.

Professor of Physics Suzanne Amador Kane co-authored "Sneak peek: hawks use stochastic head motions to perform visual searches," which appeared in The Auk. This article was covered in the news, including by a  Discovery Channel appearance on Daily Planet. Kane gave a talk at the 2016 Raptor Research Foundation annual meeting in Cape May, N.J., on her group's research on raptor take-off flight performance. (This research was conducted with John Russ '17, Paul Mundell '16, Stephen Stein '16, and Carolyn Oehrig '15.) Her students Yabin Lu and Rui Fang (both '17) gave a poster presentation on their research on the optical properties of peacock feathers at the American Physical Society March meeting in New Orleans in March. Kane gave a talk on the physics of peacock courtship displays at the University of Pennsylvania and at Kenyon College, as well as a talk on her raptor work at Dickinson College.

Associate Professor of Fine Arts Hee Sook Kim was invited as a speaker at the international seminar "A Thousand Year Old Hanji, Meets the World" in Messe Frankfurt, Germany, that was supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Crafts and Design Foundation. After that January event, her talk, "Paradise Between," was published in Hanji. She was included in The First Berliner Art Book 2017 with "Paradise Between 11, 16, 17" images, and the catalog of 36th Mini Print International included her "Paradise Between" digital prints.                                                                                                               

Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li was interviewed about her art and life for WVIA-FM public radio for the program ArtScene with Erika Funke.

A book symposium on T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth's book, Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2014), was published in the International Journal of Philosophical Studies with comments by Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut), Paul Redding (University of Sydney), and David Wolfsdorf (Temple University) and responses by Macbeth. She also authored papers included in two recent edited collections: "Natural Truth" in Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy (Routledge, 2017), and "Being Minded" in Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland (The MIT Press, 2017).

Haverford College Libraries held a reception and panel discussion for the publication of Genetics:  Genes, Genomes, and Evolution, a new book by Professor of Biology Philip Meneely, Associate Professor of Biology Rachel Hoang, Iruka Okeke, and Biology Instructor Kate Heston.

It was announced that Visiting Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Kaitlin Pomerantz will create a site-specific installation in Philadelphia's Washington Square Park for Monument Lab, a public art and history project coming to Philadelphia next fall (curated by Visiting Assistant Professor of History Paul Farber and Ken Lum). Pomerantz' installation will involve the collection and re-situation of stoops from demolished homes around the city, presenting the occasion to sit upon them and reflect on neighborhood histories, culture, and architecture, in the face of rampant urban development.

Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Deborah Roberts wrote an essay, "Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes: War, Women, and the Hecht/Bacon translation," in The Reception of Aeschylus' Plays through Shifting Models and Frontiers (Brill, 2017), which was edited by Stratos E. Constantinidis. Another essay, written in collaboration with Sheila Murnaghan, "Armies of Children: War and Peace, Ancient History and Myth in Children's Books after World War One," appeared in Our Mythical Childhood... The Classics and Literature for Children and Young Adults (Brill, 2016), which was edited by Katarzyna Marciniak.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Adam Rosenblatt gave an invited talk, "Spaces of Care: From Mass Graves to Swimming Pools," at the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University. A chapter he co-wrote with anthropologist Sarah Wagner, "Known Unknowns: Forensic Science, the Nation-State, and the Iconic Dead,” was published in Studies in Forensic Biohistory: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press). The chapter explores the science and politics of exhuming and identifying Vietnam Unknown Soldier 1st Lt. Michael Blassie, as well as icons of the Chilean left Pablo Neruda, Salvador Allende, and Victor Jara.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Nathan Sanders served as a panelist for a discussion on "The Copyrightability of Constructed Languages" at the New York Chapter of the Copyright Society of the USA. Sanders gave a linguistics-outreach lecture to middle-school students at AIM Academy in Conshohocken, Pa., and an invited talk, "What sign languages tell us about phonetics: Expanding the notion of articulatory effort," (joint work with Donna Jo Napoli of Swarthmore College) at the University of Toronto. He also gave a presentation, "Constructed languages as a bridge to interdisciplinary teaching," in the Teaching Linguistics with Invented Languages organized session at the 91st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Austin, Texas. Sanders also published an article, "A cross-linguistic preference for torso stability in the lexicon: Evidence from 24 sign languages," with co-author Donna Jo Napoli of Swarthmore College in Sign Language & Linguistics.

Visiting Professor of Health Studies and Independent College Programs Carol Schilling was guest co-editor of The Journal of Medical Humanities special issue on "Caregiving, Kinship, and the Making of Stories." She also contributed an article, "Looking after Iris: John Bayley's Elegy for the Living," to that issue.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier was awarded a U.S. Department of Energy Visiting Faculty Program grant to spend this upcoming summer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The grant also supports Liana Alves '18 to work on the project. Schrier gave a talk, "The Dark Reactions Project: Machine Learning-Assisted Materials Discovery Using Failed Experiments," at the Philadelphia Theoretical Chemistry Club at Swarthmore College and at the Inorganic Nanostructures Group of the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures Erin Schoneveld participated in an artist lecture and video-based performance titled, "Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver: Experimental Japanese Film, 1966-69" with Japanese experimental artist and filmmaker Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver at Vox Populi in Philadelphia in Philadelphia. The event was co-sponsored by Vox Populi and Collaborative Cataloging Japan. Schoneveld's lecture further contextualized Gulliver's practice through an overview of the historical and cultural context of experimental production in postwar Japan, touching upon a broad field of art and cinema that has been defined, in part, by the histories of the Gutai Group, Jikken Kobo, and Fluxus movements, and a rich legacy of experimental and narrative filmmaking that developed during postwar Japan. The event was supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Eric Stachura gave three seminar talks on "Existence of Propagators for Time Dependent Coulomb-like Potentials in Density Functional Theory" for the math department at Drexel University and both the math and physics departments at Temple University.

Associate Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Jill Stauffer published "'a fine risk to be run': Améry and Levinas on Aging, Responsibility and Risk in the Wake of Atrocity," in The Journal of French and Francophone Studies. She presented a paper, "Object Lesson: Child Soldier," on a panel on Object Lessons in Personhood at the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in January, and gave an invited talk, "Ethical Loneliness," at Quinnipiac University School of Law in their Campus Cross-Talk: Empathy, Compassion and Mindfulness series in November. The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium held an author-meets-critics event on Stauffer's book on campus in February, featuring Robert Bernasconi (Penn State), Krista Thomason (Swarthmore), Macalester Bell (Bryn Mawr), and Yannik Thiem (Villanova), and a response from the author.

Assistant Professor of Biology Kristen Whalen was awarded a three-year NSF grant, "Collaborative Research: Building a framework for the role of bacterial-derived chemical signals in mediating phytoplankton population dynamics," of which Haverford College received $356,028. Whalen will be working with collaborators at both the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography and the University of Rhode Island. Both Whalen and her senior research student, Ms. Abigail Keller '17 presented at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography Meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii. At the meeting Whalen presented a talk, "Battle in the Bloom: Bacterial Regulation of Algal Community Structure in the Ocean," and co-chaired a session, "Louder than words: chemical communication structures marine ecosystems"

Associate Professor of Chemistry Helen K. White gave three invited talks at the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, at the "Earth and Environmental Sciences" seminar at Lehigh University, and at the "Chemistry Department Seminar" at Youngstown State University in Ohio. White and Haverford undergraduate students Miranda Baker '17, Chloe Wang '17, Cicy Geng '18, and Owen Janson '18 presented their research at the ASLO 2017 Aquatic Sciences meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Wright presented a paper, "Two Ways of Learning from Chinese Philosophy in the Age of Anger: Intimations of Mortality," at the annual meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) in Baltimore in January. This APA event was organized by the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy (ISCWP).  Wright also chaired a panel on "Moral Psychology and Early Chinese Philosophy," organized by ISCWP. She also published a review of Sarah A. Mattice's Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience, in Dao: Journal of  Comparative Philosophy.

Associate Professor of English Christina Zwarg was asked to participate in an evaluation of the English Department at Gettysburg College.