Spring 2017 Faculty Updates

Assistant Professor of Economics Carola Binder was interviewed on NPR's Marketplace, discussing the Federal Reserve’s Labor Market Conditions Index, and was interviewed about wage and price growth in an era of low unemployment for a Washington Post article. Binder published "Fed Speak on Main Street: Central Bank Communication and Household Expectations" in the Journal of Macroeconomics.

Writing Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing Elizabeth Blake gave an invited talk, "The Edges of Edibles: Marianne Moore’s Apple, William Carlos Williams’s Plums," as part of the "Modernist Social Network" series at the University of Pennsylvania. Blake also contributed to a special media collection on "Education in the Era of Trump" organized by the Berkeley Review of Education.

Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy Stephen Boughn published "Making Sense of Bell’s Theorem and Quantum Nonlocality"in the journal Foundations of Physics. Einstein was repulsed by the "spooky action at a distance" that quantum mechanics seemed to imply. After Bell's theorem in 1964, many philosophers and physicists concluded that action at a distance and the non-locality it implies are indeed fundamental to quantum mechanics. In Boughn's paper, he argues that quantum mechanics does not require spooky action at a distance of any kind.         

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo’s Elegy for solo violin was performed by Francesco D’Orazio at the Auditoiruim dei Balivi in Aosta, Italy. His quartet Ma’ ijií hatáál (Coyoteway) was performed by the Amernet String Quartet and with the Quartetto di Venezia, Cacioppo performed his Grammy-nominated Women at the Cross as pianist as a part of Haverford's Concert Artists Series and on tour in New York City (as part of the Prism Project series), at West Chester University, and in Pittsburgh (as part of the Music on the Edge series) at the Andy Warhol Museum. With Professor of Fine Arts Ying Li, he and the Quartetto di Venezia presented "A Flowering of Art and Music" in Magill Library. The program included the American premiere of his Divertimenti in Italia. You can also enjoy his six new YouTube videos of his compositions and his piano playing.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian received the Haverford Phi Beta Kappa Prize in recognition of "exemplary teaching and mentoring in service of Phi Beta Kappa's ideals of academic excellence and the love of learning." She published a manuscript, "Acyl carrier protein cyanylation delivers a ketoacyl synthase-carrier protein cross-link," in the journal Biochemistry with co-authors Grace Thiele '17, Connie Friedman '15, Katie Tsai '16, Joris Beld (Drexel University), and Associate Professor of Chemistry Casey Londergan. She also gave invited talks at Drexel University and Temple University.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology Jacob Culbertson participated in three conferences in the past four months. In February, at the Annual Meetings of the Association of Social Anthropologists in Oceania in Lihue, Hawaii, he convened a panel, "Pacific Ethnography and the Method of Controlled Equivocation," on indigenous practices of comparison in the Pacific and their implications for ethnographic storytelling. In April, he was an invited participant for the Critical Indigenous Science and Technology Studies Conference at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where he presented a paper about the politics of animate ancestral landscapes in large-scale infrastructural engineering projects. In May, he was a plenary panelist (by Skype) at Auckland University of Technology's "Pacific Spinoza/Pacific Spaces" conference, which compared indigenous metaphysics in the Pacific with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. At that conference, Culbertson presented a paper, "Capacitating Comparisons," using philosophies of affect to think through Maori ritual encounters, and vice versa.

Visiting Assistant Professor Thomas Devaney was a featured speaker at the Double Take series at ApexArt in New York City in April. The theme of the talk was that all Philadelphia stories can be told through the lens of Rocky. In May he was featured poet at the Grand Army Plaza branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, hosted by Hanging Loose Press.

Associate Professor of Computer Science John Dougherty was an invited participant at the NSF Workshop on Revising the NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Guidelines for Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) in Undergraduate Education. This workshop was organized by the Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER) in Arlington, Va., on April 26. Along with Ben Schreiber (Swarthmore '16), he presented a paper, “Assessment of introducing algorithms with video lectures and pseudocode rhymed to a melody,” at the 48th Annual Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education Technical Symposium in Seattle, Wash., in March. This report covered a project conducted at Swarthmore and Haverford during the 2016-2017 academic year. Dougherty also made an additional presentation on Universal Design in Learning at an affiliated workshop, “Making K-12 Computer Science Accessible,” also in Seattle in March.

Professor of Biology Rob Fairman's protein assembly research was profiled in Scientia, an online magazine and outreach program that helps scientists publicize and explain their work to the wider world.

Associate Professor of History Andrew Friedman published the article “US Empire, World War 2, and the Racialising of Labour” in the April-June issue of the journal Race & Class.

Assistant Professor of Spanish Aurelia Gómez Unamuno presented a paper, "From Sinking to the Guerrilla Experience: Denouncing Torture and Enforced Disappearance in Testimonial Writings of Guerrilla Fighters in Mexico," and organized a panel, "Memory, State Violence and Enforced Disappearance in Mexico. From Denouncing to the Praxis of Other Knowledges," at the Latin American Studies Association's Diálogos de Saberes at Universidad Pontificia Católica del Perú, in Lima, Peru.

Associate Professor of Music Heidi Jacob, as newly appointed associate conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of First Editions, conducted Professor Curt Cacioppo’s A Meeting of Souls (2012) for string orchestra and harpsichord at Haverford College and the Trinity Center in Philadelphia In March, her Metamorphosis for Cello and Piano was performed by cellist Thalia Moore in San Francisco as part a performance by the contemporary music group Earplay and her work for solo piano, 'but time will tell,' was performed by Charles Abramovic, as part a performance by L’Ensemble in Bennington Vt.. On May 9, Jacob was guest conductor of The Dolce Suono Ensemble, conducting Steven Stucky's Cantus at the Curtis Institute of Music. And on May 18, her Soliloquy for solo violin was performed by Francesco d’orazio at Stagione concertisstica del Conservatoire de la Vallée d’Aoste.

Associate Professor of Religion Naomi Koltun-Fromm presented a paper, "Jerusalem Mythologies: Pilgrims and the Dome of the Rock," at the "The Emergence of Sacred Travel: Comparativism and the Study of Ancient Mediterranean Pilgrimage" symposium at Aarhus University in Denmark.

Emeritus Professor of History Emma Lapsansky published "The Changing World of Quaker Material Culture" in The Cambridge Companion to Quaker Studies. Lapsansky also gave a presentation, "Theology on the Ground: Quakers and Intentional Community in Twentieth Century America," at "A Quaker Roundtable: 20th Century American Quakerism, A Timely Assessment" at Earlham College.

Assistant Professof of Linguistics Brook Lillehaugen published "Positional Verbs in Colonial Valley Zapotec" with John Foreman in the International Journal of American Linguistics. She also directed a team that published a digital edition of Fray Leonardo Levanto's 1766 Cathecismo de la lengua Zaapotec. Lillehaugen also gave two invited talks: "Archives, morphological analysis, and XML encoding: interdisciplinary methods in the creation of an online corpus of endangered language texts" at the Workshop on American Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, and "The promise of digital scholarship in the study of indigenous language texts: access, inclusion, and opportunity" at the closing symposium on "Reading the First Books: Multilingual, Early-Modern Optical Character Recognition for Primeros Libros" at the University of Texas, Austin.

Associate Professor of Spanish Ana Lopez Sanchez presented a paper, "Identity work and L2 Literacy development in the production of digital narratives," at the American Association of Applied Linguistics Meeting in Portland, Or. She also presented a paper, "Genres for the novice learners: what and how to teach at the introductory language level," at the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics Meetinh in Jaen, Spain.                                               

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth presented a paper, "Reasoning in Minds and Machines," at the "Women in Philosophy: Philosophy in Action" conference at Uppsala University in Sweden. Macbeth was also an invited lecturer, speaking on her work five hours a day for three days, at the Spring Meeting of the Performing Arts Forum (PAF) in St. Erme, France.

Professor of Sociology Matthew McKeever published "Educational Inequality in Apartheid South Africa" in American Behavioral Scientist.

Associate Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan was elected to the Board of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States as its Philadelphia-area representative; designed and launched CommentarySandbox, a Wordpress plugin to create Dickinson College Commentaries-style commentaries; and assumed directorship of Classicizing Philadelphia, a research and outreach project in the reception of the classics in Philadelphia. Mulligan also published an article, "Translation and the Poetics of Replication in the Late Antique Latin Epigram," in Tradition and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity and published a review of Aaron Pelttari's The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity in the Journal of Roman Studies. He also organized a panel on "Medieval Wisdom Literature" at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Toronto.

Assistant Professor of Economics Giri Parameswaran published "Bargaining and Bicameralism" in Legislative Quarterly Studies.     

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Deborah Roberts gave a paper, "Gilgamesh as Special Child: Saving the Story," (written in collaboration with Sheila Murnaghan) at the "Our Mythical Hope in Children's and Young Adult Literature" conference held at the University of Warsaw.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Adam Rosenblatt presented a paper, "Aparición con vida: Disappearance and the Politics of the Counterfactual, from Argentina to Ayotzinapa," at the Latin American Studies Association's annual meeting in Lima, Peru. Rosenblatt participated in a workshop and other activities as part of a Ford-LASA funded workshop on "Methodological, Forensic, Humanitarian and Judicial Challenges in Recovering and Identifying the Disappeared," featuring scholars and scientists from the U.S., Chile, Spain, and the U.K. He gave a talk, "The Matter of Injustice: Archives of Violence in the Americas," with Social Science Librarian Brie Gettleson as part of the "Archiving Ideals" panel presented by the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, Haverford College Libraries, and the Office of the Provost. He also spoke on a panel, "Different Bodies, Different Minds, One Learning Community," at Friends School Haverford. The panel, featuring university professors and K-12 educators, dealt with themes of identity, race, sexuality, neurodiversity, ableism, and the ideology of "colorblindness" and asked how we can move beyond "tolerance" to nurturance and belonging in our learning communities. Rosenblatt spoke specifically about race, autism, and repairing the broken pedagogical bridge between K-12 and college classrooms.

Assistant Professor of Linguistics Nathan Sanders gave an invited talk, "Scales of effort in sign language articulation and perception," at the University of Delaware.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Joshua Schrier's textbook, Introduction to Computational Physical Chemistry, was published by University Science Books. Schrier also participated in a NSF Workshop on "Framing the Role of Big Data and Modern Data Science in Chemistry" in Arlington, Va., including giving an invited talk, “What is the current state of data science to support decision making in chemical research?” He gave a chemistry departmental seminar on "The Dark Reactions Project: Machine Learning-Assisted Materials Discovery using Failed Experiments," at Haverford College, and he gave a talk, "The Dark Reactions Project: A machine learning approach to materials discovery," at the 253nd American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Francisco.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Eric Stachura published two articles: "Existence of Weak Solutions to Refraction Problems in Negative Refractive Index Materials" in Nonlinear Analysis, and "The Time Dependent Maxwell System with Measurable Coefficients in Lipschitz Domains" in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. Stachura attended two weeklong conferences at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications: "Optical Imaging and Inverse Problems" and "Emerging Topics in Optics." He also gave short talks at the 7th Ohio River Analysis Meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at the AMS Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting in New York. And, in April, he volunteered at the Philadelphia Science Festival.

Associate Professor and Director 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 Philosophy and gave the keynote address, “Failures of hearing,” at the Listening for Justice Symposium at Durham Law School (UK). Stauffer also gave three conference presentations: “The Closest Thing that Comes to My Mind: Law, Indigenous Land Claims, and Decolonial Hearing” at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities at Stanford University, “Object Lesson: Child Soldier” at the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, and an "Author Meets Critics" event for her book Ethical Loneliness at Haverford College.

Assistant Professor of Biology Kristen Whalen traveled to the Norwegian Marine Biological Station run by the University of Bergen, Norway, with Anna Schrecengost '18 from May 13 to June 2. This field station has a number of specialized facilities and an internationally recognized for its mesocosm facility. They joined a team of 25 scientists from Rutgers, the University of Georgia, MIT, Southhampton, Caltech, and the Institut Biologie Physico Cheme (Paris, France) to study the physiological effects of bacterial natural products on phytoplankton blooms. This field experience is supported by a National Science Foundation Grant in Biological Oceanography.

Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Wright published a review of Sarah A. Mattice's Metaphor and Metaphilosophy: Philosophy as Combat, Play, and Aesthetic Experience in Dao.