Summer Faculty Updates

Associate Professor of Political Science Craig Borowiak co-organized a conference,“Exploring Cooperatives: Economic Democracy and Community Development in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” that was held at Drexel University in June.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo was composer in residence at the Carmel Bach Festival in California this July. His work Midsummer Air, commissioned by the festival, was performed three times, with subsequent broadcasts on Central Coast NPR station KUSP-FM 88.9. In addition to a series of pre-concert discussions and lecture performances recorded by cable station AMP2, he presented his music to students of the Youth Orchestra of Salinas El Sistema nucleo program, and performed with YOSAL faculty members. The Monterey Herald described his new piece as“tender, sweeping and jazz-infused,” while the Peninsula Reviews critic wrote,“Cacioppo's work was also a true delight—borrowing the famous opening bass line from Bach's Air and becoming a rich tapestry of jazzy rhythmic complexity and harmonic beauty. I look forward to hearing more from Mr. Cacioppo.” Music director Paul Goodwin, who led the concerts on which Cacioppo's piece was introduced, had issued a very specific request, that in this work, the composer create a movement to substitute for Bach's famous Air on the G String within the context of the full Orchestral Suite No. 3. Goodwin had sought out Cacioppo for this project based on his acquaintance with an earlier work, the Concerto for Oboe and String Chamber Orchestra with Harpsichord, which celebrated another Baroque composer, Antonio Vivaldi. To hear some of that work, click here, scroll down to the eighth CD and click the forward arrow.

Associate Professor of East Asian Studies Hank Glassman presented a paper in Japanese at a conference in Kyoto dedicated to medieval Japanese religion and cultural flows in East Asia. This event was jointly sponsored by the National Museum of Japanese History and the University of Illinois. Glassman also participated in a collaborative three-day research trip with conference colleagues to the Kumano Mountains, an area important to his current research.

Edmund and Margiana Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Professor of Anthropology Laurie Hart published“Expectations of the State: An Exile Returns to his Country,” an essay analyzing the challenges of long term re-integration faced by exiles from ethnopolitical conflicts and civil wars through the narrative of a former child political refugee, in the book Contesting the State: Dynamics of Resistance and Control. Hart was also a discussant in the workshop“Segregated zones of living: refugee camps, asylum centers, ghettos” at the conference“Transnational Migration and Global Development,” organized by the University of Bergen and attended by 40 Ph.D. students from around the world.

Associate Professor of Religion Tracey Hucks published the book Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism: Exploring the Yoruba Tradition in the United States, via the Religions of America series of the University of New Mexico Press.

Associate Professor of Psychology Benjamin Le was interviewed in Main Line Today magazine as a relationship expert. Le is one of the authors of the  book and website, The Science of Relationships. (Read the article here.) Le also co-chaired an interest group meeting at the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) in Chicago this July, titled“Reaching a mass audience: Exciting developments in making relationship research accessible to all.”

Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li earned a Heliker-LaHotan Foundation Residency Award, which provides opportunities for mature individual artists to work uninterrupted on Cranberry Island, Maine. Li was in residence there in June and July. Her work was featured in two art exhibitions: Respect: Artists Invite Artists at Valley House Gallery in Dallas, and Zeuxis, Reflections at Rosemary Berkel and Harry L. Crisp II Museum at Southeast Missouri State University.

Associate Professor of Music Thomas Lloyd's composition, Camp Meeting, was performed as part of the Big Sing concert of the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia on July 25, 2012, at First Baptist Church in Philadelphia. More information here. Originally composed for the Chamber Singers, Camp Meeting reenacts an imagined musical interaction between rural whites and black slaves at a typical religious revival in the antebellum period in the South. Lloyd was also a featured panelist on the topic of“Building Successful International Collaborations” at the Yale International Choral Festival Symposium, "Choirs Transforming Our World," an event of the International Federation of Choral Musicians. Lloyd addressed lessons learned related to cross-cultural awareness and collaboration based on his development of the Bi-College Chamber Singers international touring program.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Lisa McCormick was invited to speak at a pre-conference for the Global and Transnational Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. She presented a paper,“The Sound of Civility: Competitions and the Meaning of a Global Musical Public.”

Assistant Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn published“God vs. Westphalia: Radical Islamist Movements and the Battle for Organizing the World” in Review of International Studies.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Shannon Mudd responded to a series of questions about impact investing following his participation in the Impact Investing In Action Conference held in Atlanta in June. Mudd's responses are featured in Agora Partnerships's blog here. In addition, a Microfinance and Impact Investing Initiative (MI3) project with Agora Partnerships was featured in“News From The Field” distributed at the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Metrics from the Ground Up conference held in June. In that project Haverford students collaborated with Agora to help 10 entrepreneurs in Central America identify  their social and environmental impacts and learn how to measure them. At the conference, Mudd, coordinator of MI3, and student project consultant Thembi Mdachi BMC '12 served on a panel session,“Adding Value Through Student Projects.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice and Human Rights Joshua Ramey, who also teaches in the Writing Program, published his book The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal via Duke University Press.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier gave talks on“Isotopic and chemical separations using nanoporous two-dimensional membranes” at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in August. He gave two talks at the 244th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Philadelphia:“How fast is gas separation through a nanoporous graphene membrane? The role of surface adsorption, and application to post-combustion CO2 capture” and "Isotope separation using quantum tunneling.” Schrier also published a paper,“Carbon Dioxide Separation with a Two-Dimensional Polymer Membrane,” in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. He, Anna Brockway '12 and Associate Professor of Chemistry Frances Blase recently applied for a provisional patent on the material, PG-ES1, described in this work. Schrier and Associate Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist were awarded 225,000 CPU hours on the National Science Foundation XSEDE supercomputing system, to support their joint computational-experimental work on organically-templated inorganic compounds.