Spring 2020 Faculty Update

Professor of Physics and Astronomy Suzanne Amador Kane gave the McNulty Seminar at St. Josephs University on March 4. The third edition of her textbook, Introduction to Physics in Modern Medicine, co-authored with Boris A. Gelman, was released in March. 

Assistant Professor of Economics Carola Binder presented “Inflation Expectations and Consumption: Evidence from 1951” at the Deutsche Bundesbank Research Seminar Series webinar, and was a panelist at the “Perspectives on COVID-19” cross-disciplinary Haverford College webinar. Binder was a guest on David Beckworth's "Macro Musings" podcast, discussing her work on the politics of central banking, and she was interviewed about COVID-19 and the economy on NBC10 Philadelphia and by the Philadelphia Business Journal. She also had two papers accepted for publication in the Review of Economics and Statistics: "Coronavirus Fears and Macroeconomic Expectations" and "Stuck in the Seventies: Gas Prices and Consumer Sentiment." The former was the first paper about COVID-19 to be published in a peer-reviewed economics journal. Her paper "Central Bank Communication and Disagreement about the Natural Rate Hypothesis" was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Central Banking, and "Long-Run Inflation Expectations in the Shrinking Upper Tail" was published in Economics Letters.

Ruth Marshall Magill Professor of Music Curtis Cacioppo released two new CDs: Metamorphoses (Albany Records 1822), a one-composer disc including works for solo piano, orchestra, and a cappella choir featuring Assistant Professor of Music Nathan Zullinger as conductor; and Through Glass (Navona Records 6289), a compilation of works by Cacioppo and five fellow composers. A third album, Illuminations (MSR Classics 1777), a one-composer collection featuring Cacioppo also as performer on five of its seven tracks, is due later this summer. Cacioppo also completed five new compositions for performers in the U.S. and in Italy, and authored liner notes for the debut release Resonance (MSR Classics 1655) by pianist Amy Yang of the Curtis Institute.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Thomas Devaney wrote an opinion article for WHYY's PlanPhilly against Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney’s budget plan and in support of the city’s arts offices. In April, for National Poetry Month, Devaney was also featured in a video series from the Pew Center for the Arts, Pew Fellows From Home. 

Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Rebecca Everett co-authored two papers: “Agent-based and continuous models of hopper bands for the Australian plague locust: How resource consumption mediates pulse formation and geometry” in PLOS Computational Biology and “A tutorial review of mathematical techniques for quantifying tumor heterogeneity” in Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering.

John C. Whitehead '43 Professor of Humanities and Associate Provost for Curricular Development Richard Freedman won a Digital Extension grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for his project, “Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass.” His award is one of only five grants given nationally this year and is the only one granted to a liberal arts institution. Says Freedman: ”Building upon recent developments in digital music scholarship, ‘Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass’ investigates similarity and borrowing in music on a massive but detailed scale, using digital tools that only a few years ago were beyond our grasp. Our work focuses on the craft of musical counterpoint, and how musicians of the sixteenth century transformed pre-existing pieces to make intricate cyclic compositions from familiar sounds. The CRIM team, an accomplished group of scholars and data scientists active in Europe, North America, and Australia, will assemble a diverse collaborative network of music scholars and students at colleges, music schools and university graduate programs, extending the reach of digital scholarship to new users, and building new communities."

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sorelle Friedler traveled with Emile Givental '20 to Barcelona in January to attend the Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. They were met in Spain by Dylan Slack '19 and Richard Phillips '18. Slack presented joint work with Friedler and Givental, "Fairness Warnings and Fair-MAML: Learning Fairly with Minimal Data," to an audience of over 500 people.

Associate Professor of History Andrew Friedman published a chapter, ”United States Power in a Material World," in A Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations, Colonial Era to the Present, edited by Christopher Dietrich (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020). Friedman’s last book, Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (University of California, 2013), was included in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of the best scholarly books of the last decade.

Associate Professor of Spanish Aurelia Gómez Unamuno’s book Entre fuegos. Memoria y violencia de Estado: los textos literarios y testimoniales del moviento armado en México (UNCP) was published by A Contracorriente in April 2020.

Predoctoral Fellow and Visiting Instructor of Visual Studies Shannan Hayes wrote an article, “Wanting More,” for the May 2020 issue of Duke University Press’ differences. Hayes also wrote a book review of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing for the Journal of Visual Culture.

Associate Professor of Religion Naomi Koltun-Fromm and Gwynn Kessler edited The Blackwell Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019).

Associate Professor of Linguistics Brook Lillehaugen gave a conference presentation on "TEI encoding and the creation of digital editions of Zapotec-language texts in an undergraduate classroom" as part of the Digital Methods in the Colonial Latin American Studies Undergraduate Classroom Panel at the annual meeting of the Latin American Society of America (LASA) in Guadalajara (online).

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth published an essay, “Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan,” as the prologue in A Companion to Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020).

Associate Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn began writing a blog in Hebrew for the web magazine Zman Israel (Israel time). Hi first post was "Especially now, proud to be an American citizen.”

Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist just published a paper, “Can Machines ‘Learn’ Halide Perovskite Crystal Formation without Accurate Physicochemical Features?” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C. He also published an article, “Robot-Accelerated Peroskite Investigation and Discovery,” in Chemistry of Materials with four Haverford undergrad co-authors: Liana Alves '18, Alyssa Sherman '18, Peter Cruz Parrilla '20 and Philip Nega ’16. Norquist and Fordam’s Joshua Schrier published a guest editorial in Chemical and Engineering News, the professional magazine for the American Chemical Society, about using the COVID shutdown as an opportunity to curate experimental data. He also published a paper on the machine learning assisted synthesis of polar racemates in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Elizabeth Ufford Green Professor of Natural Sciences and Professor of Biology Judith Owen published “Active Learning and Technology Approaches for Teaching Immunology to Undergraduate Students,” a refereed paper co-authored with three other practicing immunologists engaged in teaching undergraduates (Pomona’s Sharon Stranford, Cal State Poly’s Frances Mercer at Cal State Poly, Occidental’s Roberta R. Pollock), in Frontiers in Public Health. Owen also submitted an invited paper for a festschrift for her postdoctoral adviser, Laureate Professor Peter Doherty: “The Education of Future Immunologists: Lessons From the Doherty Lab.” “Peter won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1996, and nominally retired this year,” says Owen. “However, the coronavirus pandemic has not allowed him to fully do so. The Institute in Australia that bears his name was the first place outside of China to sequence the virus and is actively engaged in generating a vaccine.”

Visiting Professor of Independent College Programs and Health Studies Carol Schilling published the chapter “Elegy for Iris” in the book Disability Experiences: Memoirs, Autobiographies, and other Personal Narratives, which received an honorable mention for the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association for outstanding reference book. She also presented “Reading Memoirs of Kinship Caregivers” at the Tri-Co Medical Humanities Network Symposium, held at Swarthmore College in February. 

Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Visual Studies and Director of Visual Studies Erin Schoneveld’s book Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazines, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-garde (Brill, 2019) was featured in the “New Books in East Asian Studies” podcast interview series by the New Books Network.

Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature Ulrich Schönherr published a book review of Frederik Schneeweiss’ Medialität und Musikopoetik: Grenzfälle der Sprache im Werk von Gert Jonke in Literaturkritik.

Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies David Harrington Watt has been awarded a Sabbatical Research Grant from the Louisville Institute. The grant will support Watt’s pedagogical and scholarly work on Quakers’ responses to the Holocaust.

Associate Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies and Director of KINSC Helen White co-authored a review article on the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, “The first decade of scientific insights from the Deepwater Horizon oil release,” in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment. She also published “Quantum cascade laser-based reflectance spectroscopy: a robust approach for the classification of plastic type” in Optics Express and “Probing the chemical transformation of seawater-soluble crude oil components during microbial oxidation” in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry. White also gave a presentation on “Exploring the unknown impacts of humans on the oceans” as part of the Distinguished Visiting Scientist program at Friends’ Central School.

Audrey A. and John L. Dusseau Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Fine Arts William Earle Williams published a new monograph, Party Pictures, with the Print Center. It features black-and-white photos taken during the 1970s and ‘80s of Philadelphia social events. The publication was celebrated with a launch party at the Print Center in Philadelphia on March 12, and was featured in the Print Center’s “Books We Love” list. Williams also spoke about the book as part of the Franklin Inn Club Philadelphia Zoom Luncheon Roundtable in June.

Associate Professor of Political Science Susanna Wing published an in-depth briefing on  “Combating Insecurity in Mali” in the Center for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research’s Global Analysis Briefing.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Writing Fellow Rosetta Young received a Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship for a month of in-residence research at the American Antiquarian Society.

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