Winter 2019 Faculty Updates

Assistant Professor of Psychology Laura Been and four Haverford students (Luis Acaba ’16, David Sidibe ’16, John Thygesen ’16, Harrison Van der Kloot ’16) coauthored “Sex Experience Increases Delta FosB in Male and Female Hamsters, but Facilitates Sex Behavior Only in Females” in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Assistant Professor of Economics Carola Binder presented research and served as a discussant at the Midwest Economics Association Annual Meeting in St. Louis, Mo.. She gave a seminar at University of Maryland - Baltimore County on "Political Pressure on Central Banks” and presented "Political Pressure on Central Banks" at the Eastern Economic Association Annual Conference in New York City. At the latter conference, she also chaired two sessions, "Central Banking and Governance" and "Development and Business Cycles," and served as a discussant for two other papers.

Professor Emeritus of Spanish and Comparative Literature Israel Burshatin published a book review of Javier Irigoyen-García’s Moors Dressed as Moors. Clothing, Social Distinction, and Ethnicity in Early Modern Iberia in the Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. Burshatin contributed an essay, “Invisible Works: Visuality, Contemplation and Truth in A/O (Céspedes Case)," and a selection and edition of the trial documents of the Toledo Inquisition case (1587-89) of the trans surgeon, Eleno de Céspedes to Cabello/Carceller. Anexo: Caso Céspedes. Addendum: The Céspedes Case (MUAC, 2019). He also presented on this work in his keynote talk, “Tomó [h]ábito de hombre”: géneros, visibilidad, y poder en el Caso Céspedes,” at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curt Cacioppo completed his new solo work Gone Bats for the Italian cellist Nicola Fiorino and his new solo piano work Endgame (a companion piece to his earlier Il pensionato). His collaborations with the Quartetto di Venezia were chronicled in a feature story in Italy’s prestigious Giornale della Musica. The story links to one of his collaborations with Ying Li, Sorriso a Catania. He also produced three YouTube videos: Nuvole grigie by Marino Baratello, Mark Hagerty: “Facets”, and Curt Cacioppo: Largo for strings.

Assistant Professor Lou Charkoudian published a book chapter "Studying trans-acting enzymes that target carrier protein-bound amino acids during nonribosomal peptide synthesis" with collaborator Max Cryle (Monash University) in Methods in Enzymology. She also published an article, "FAIL is not a four-letter word: A theoretical framework for exploring undergraduate students' approaches to academic challenge and response in STEM learning environments," in CBE Life Science Education with collaborators Lisa Corwin (University of Colorado Boulder), Meredith Henry (Emory University), Shayla Shorter (Emory University), and Jennifer Heemstra (Emory University).

Associate Professor of Computer Science John Dougherty was recognized by the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) in Minneapolis, Minn., during the 50th-anniversary celebration for serving twice as symposium chair and twice as program chair. He also served as the affiliated events chair for SIGCSE 2019.

Emily Judson Baugh Gest and John Marshall Gest Professor of Global Philosophy Ashok Gangadean started a web-based video channel, HuManUp.tv, to present the results of his research and teaching in global philosophy. One series on the channel, ((1776: Our Un-finished American R-Evolution)), explores the r-evolutionary opening vision of our Declaration of Independence.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and Coordinator of Scientific Computing Daniel Grin attended the American Astronomical Society Winter Meeting in Seattle, Wash., where he presented a poster on long-wavelength modulations of the cosmic microwave background (the afterglow of the big bang) due to spatial fluctuations in fundamental "constants" and variations in the primordial ratio of dark to ordinary matter. Grin’s Haverford students Patrick Adams ’19, David Zegeye ’19, Jonathan Cookmeyer ’17, and Gerrit Farren ’20, and visiting student Kayla Nowak (Lycoming ’20) presented posters at that conference on their research with Grin. He also published two manuscripts, "Cosmological implications of ultralight axionlike fields" and “Probing spatial variation of the fine-structure constant using the CMB” in Physical Review, and submitted a white paper, "Gravitational probes of ultra-light axions," to the National Academy of Science Astro2020 decadal review process, which sets community research priorities in astrophysics. The document picked up 80 endorsements, and has seven co-authors in addition to Grin, who is lead author.

Associate Professor of Music Heidi Jacob’s work for piano was selected as part of Call for Scores for “The Keyboard in the 21st Century,” in Hong Kong. Her work for harpsichord and narrator was performed at Temple University Keyboard Festival Rock Hall. She conducted Chamber Orchestra of First Editions at Swarthmore College and her Suite for Flute and Piano was performed at Flute Day at Penn State University. She and her husband, Charles Abramovic, composed the soundtrack for the film My Sister Hali, which showed at the Amsterdam International Film Festival and the Veritas Film Festival in Pittsburgh, Pa, as well as on WHYY. Other performances include her Metamorphosis at the Veterans War Memorial in San Francisco, Calif., and her Scherzo for Flute and Marimba at Festival Osmose 2018 in Belgium.

Professor of Biology Karl Johnson was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his work on Chlamydomonas. Read more about this award here.

Professor of Fine Arts Hee Sook Kim had two solo shows: Paradise Between at the Abington Art Center in Philadelphia, Pa., and Reflections at the Kyo Gallery in Alexandria, Va. Her work was also featured in the group exhibition Spectrum Miami-Art Basel Miami Art Week 2018 at Artblend Gallery in Miami, Fla., and her artwork was the selected for the cover of Disrupting Kinship (University of Illinois Press, 2018). Kim also produced video for the one-act opera Lost in the Woods, which was performed at the Fleischer Art Memorial in Philadelphia and the Dimenna Center in New York.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion Brett Krutzsch published his book, Dying To Be Normal: Gay Martyrs and the Transformation of American Sexual Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Assistant Professor and Haverford Chair of Linguistics Brook Lillehaugen and students Marcelo Jauregui-Volpe ’18 and Katie Rodgers ’18 presented their documentary Dizhsa Nabani— Lengua Viva— Living Language at the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas annual meeting in New York City. The film was also shown at the Smithsonian’s Mother Tongue Film Festival in February, where Lillehaugen sat on a panel. She also gave an invited talk, “Engaged scholarship: from archives to web series,” to members of the Haverford College Lawyers Network.

Director of College Writing Center and Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing Kristin Lindgren and collaborators Lindsey Lopes '16, Sarah Waldis '16, Stephanie Terrell '18, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian published "Vibrant Symbiosis: Achieving Reciprocal Science Outreach through Biological Art" in PLOS Biology. The article grew out of a bioart project the students designed for Lindgren’s “Critical Disability Studies” course and collaboration with community partner, the Center for Creative Works in Wynnewood, Pa.

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth presented an invited paper in December at a the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium conference devoted to the Pittsburgh School. Her topic was the differing conceptions of the rationality of inquiry of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell, both of whom were Macbeth’s teachers at the University of Pittsburgh.

Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Karen Masters attended the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash.

Associate Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn was invited to join the board of the journal International Studies Quarterly and gave two talks on “Jihadism Constrained” at Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University.

Associate Professor and Chair of Classics Bret Mulligan launched Concordance Liberation Project in collaboration with Christopher Francese (Dickinson College). The project seeks to digitize and make available via open access the data bound within out-of-print concordances. He also published "Obscenity in the Ancient Greek and Roman Epigram" in A Companion to Ancient Epigram (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).

Associate Professor of Political Science Zachary Oberfield published an article, “Change and Stability in Public Workforce Development: A Ten-Year Study of New Officers in an Urban Police Department” in Public Management Review.

Associate Professor of Political Science Paulina Ochoa Espejo received the American Council of Learned Societies 2019 Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars.

William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Deborah Roberts and Sheila Murnaghan (University of Pennsylvania) published a short essay, "Encounters with Classical Myth in Childhood and Beyond," in Eidolon, an online journal which aims to make "the classics political and personal, feminist and fun."

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures Erin Schoneveld published a book, Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-garde (BRILL, 2018), which won the Japan Art History Forum First Book Subvention Prize. She also co-edited a special issue, Digital Asia, that was published in ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts. Her article “Japanese Modernism Across Media” examines the pedagogical benefits of implementing a semester-long digital curation project using the open-source web-publishing platform Omeka Classic.

Associate Professor of English Gustavus Stadler published an essay, “In Search of Lost Chords: Joni Mitchell, The Last Waltz, and the Refuge of the Road" in the volume Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Professor Emeritus of History Susan Stuard organized and presented on “The West's Medieval Experience in World History Perspective” at the Medieval Academy of America’s annual conference on March 9.

Assistant Professor of Biology Kristen Whalen gave four invited seminars in the fall semester—Saint Joseph’s University, Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Alabama—on research relating to her NSF grant in biological oceanography, investigating chemically mediated bacterial interactions with marine phytoplankton. Whalen also chaired a session at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) 2019 Aquatic Sciences Meeting in Puerto Rico on “Phytoplankton-bacteria interactions: molecular insights, chemical drivers, and behavioral dynamics” and gave an invited talk, “'Deciphering the ocean’s chemoinformatic language: a tale of two molecules.” Scott Pollara '19 and Ellysia Overton '19 presented their research at ASLO 2019 as well. Whalen also published a manuscript, "The chemical cue tetrabromopyrrole induces rapid cellular stress and mortality in phytoplankton," in Scientific Reports with student co-authors Russell Nicholson '18 and Mia O'Reilly '18.

Associate Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies Helen White gave two invited talks, “The qualities of the sea” at the Inhabited Sea Meeting of the Program in Climate Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai, India, and “Linking chemical analysis with genomics to gain insight into the biochemistry of oil degradation” at the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill & Ecosystem Science Conference in New Orleans, La. She also published two journal articles, “Hurricane Isaac brings more than oil ashore: Characteristics of beach deposits following the Deepwater Horizon spill” and “Exposomes and Dysregulated Metabolic Pathways Associated with Nosema ceranae Infection” in PLOS One.

Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor for the Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts William Williams gave an artist talk in conjunction with his photo exhibit, A Stirring Song Sung Heroic, at Syracuse University. A video of the talk can be found here. Williams was invited by the Yale University School of Art to give critiques of Yale College Art majors concentrating in photography and School of Art M.F.A. candidates in photography. He also gave a public presentation, "A Life in Photography and Photographs," at Yale.

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Kathleen Wright gave two invited talks: “The ‘Triad’ in the Xunzi: ‘Human, Heaven, and Earth’ or ‘Heaven, Human, and Earth’?" at the annual conference for the American Academy of Religion, and "Overcoming Eurocentrism: Europe as the Self versus the Other or Europe as the Other of the Other?” at the meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at Penn State University. She also presented a paper, “The Empress of Zhao: An Overlooked ‘Exemplary Woman’ in Early China?” at the Women as Exemplary Persons in the Ru (Confucian) Tradition at the Confucius Institute U.S. Center in Washington, D.C.. She was a panelist at the American Philosophical Association’s central division meeting in Denver, Colo., where she presented a paper, “Intercultural Philosophy and/or New Confucianism,” at the Chinese and Continental Philosophy Panel.

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