Summer 2023 Faculty Update

On June 20, Professor of Economics Richard Ball and Associate Librarian Norm Medeiros gave a keynote talk at a symposium titled “Perspectives on Teaching Reproducibility” sponsored by the UK Reproducibility Network and the Sheffield Methods Institute. The symposium was held at the University of Sheffield.

The following day, Ball and Medeiros led a day-long Project TIER faculty development workshop titled “Teaching Transparent Methods of Empirical Research,” which was attended by instructors of quantitative methods classes from the University of Sheffield and neighboring institutions.

From July 24 through 27, Ball, Medeiros, and Morehouse College Associate Professor of Political Science Matthew Platt led a virtual four-day Project TIER faculty development workshop on “Teaching Reproducible Research.” The workshop was sponsored by the Data Science Initiative of the Atlanta University Center Consortium and attended by quantitative methods instructors from Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, the Morehouse School of Medicine, and Spelman College.

Ball also had a paper, “‘Yes We Can!’ An Incremental Approach to Teaching Reproducibility,” published in the Harvard Data Science Review.

Associate Professor of Economics Carola Binder gave a talk on monetary policy frameworks at the Bennett McCallum memorial conference in Washington, D.C. She also made several appearances on NPR discussing inflation and the US government debt downgrading and was quoted in the CNN article “Why Biden’s strong economy feels so bad to most Americans.”

Associate Professor and Haverford Chair of Linguistics Jane Chandlee published a chapter titled “Metathesis” in the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology.

Chandlee also gave a plenary talk titled “From Formal Learnability Toward Phonological Acquisition” at the annual meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, held at the University of Massachusetts in June.

Additionally, Chandlee taught a mini-course on Formal Language Theory and Phonology with Adam Jardine (Rutgers University) at the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute, held at the University of Massachusetts in July.

Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian was appointed by the Center for Scientific Review through the National Institutes of Health to serve a four-year term in the Chemical Synthesis & Biosynthesis Study Section. She gave a keynote talk at the American Chemical Society Organic Chemistry Graduate Research Symposium and an invited seminar at Stanford University.

Charkoudian was also awarded the Chace Parker Prize for Excellence in Teaching and co-authored the book Inclusivity in Introductory STEM Courses: A Guide to Improving Student (and Instructor!) Mindsets.

The fifth edition of Professor of Psychology Rebecca Compton’s textbook Cognitive Neuroscience, co-authored with Marie Banich of University of Colorado Boulder, was recently published by Cambridge University Press.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Thomas Devaney published an article on an exhibition about Philadelphia’s Electric Factory concerts, Electrified: 50 Years of Electric Factory at Billy Penn on Oct. 1. He was also the featured poet at The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment series on September 14. The program focused on Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Tom Donahue, with Juan Espíndola of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), won a $9,000 Centennial Center Research Grant from the American Political Science Association. The grant supports the project “Engaged Political Theory for the Americas: Democratizing AI and Digital Platforms for Our Hemisphere.” That project will draw together political thinkers from across the Americas to discuss these themes at two conferences to be held at UNAM in Mexico City in 2024. It thus forms part of Donahue’s broader “Reconnecting Theory” research collaboration, which has been seeded by the Office of the Provost, the John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, and the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship.

Associate Professor of Computer Science John Dougherty and his colleague Bruce Char of Drexel University presented work to identify how students perceive the connections between their experiences in mathematics and computing at the annual Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges conference held April 14 and 15 at Ithaca College.

The John C. Whitehead 1943 Professor of Humanities and Chair of Music Richard Freedman and members of his research team from McGill University and Uppsala University presented a panel of papers, “What Can We Teach Machines about Renaissance Counterpoint, and What Can They Teach Us about Analysis,” at the Annual Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference held in Munich in late July.

Freedman’s co-edited book (with Jeanice Brooks of Southampton University), A Cultural History of Music in the Renaissance, has just been published by Bloomsbury Press as part of its Cultural History of Western Music series.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Charles Goldhaber’s paper “Hume's Skeptical Philosophy and the Moderation of Pride” was accepted for publication at Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Goldhaber presented a talk of the same title at the 49th International Hume Society Conference in Provo, Utah, where he was awarded the Hume Society's Emerging Scholar Award for the second year in a row. He also wrote two book reviews, including Michael Bergmann’s Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition (published in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) and Nathan I. Sasser’s Hume and the Demands of Philosophy: Science, Skepticism, and Moderation (forthcoming in Journal of Scottish Philosophy).

Assistant Professor of Religion Guangtian Ha is a 2023-2024 individual fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies, The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ha’s project is titled “From Baghdad to Canton: Sailors, Slaves, and Global Blackness in Medieval Maritime Asia.” His book The Sound of Salvation: Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China (Columbia University Press 2022) won the 2023 Clifford Geertz Prize in anthropology of religion.

Eric Hartman, executive director of Haverford’s Center for Peace and Global Citizenship, delivered an invited lecture titled “Ethical Global Leadership, Grounded in Place” through Lehigh University’s Iacocca Global Entrepreneurship Program in July.

In June, Hartman was the keynote speaker for “Beyond the Classroom: Community-Engaged Teaching and Research 2023,” a conference at Gannon University in Erie, Pennsylvania. Hartman's keynote was titled “The Civic Imagination and Inclusive Action, Erie and Outward.”

Associate Professor and Chair of Biology Roshan Jain presented his lab’s research on the behavioral functions of the autism-linked gene ap2s1 at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Regional meeting in Algarve, Portugal, in May. The presentation featured the work of 10 Haverford alums, in collaboration with labs at the Institut de la Vision (Paris, France) and the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown (Lisbon, Portugal). Jain also presented his lab’s research on the regulation of behavioral flexibility by distinct serotonin receptors at the International Neural and Behavioural Genetics Society's Genes, Brain, & Behavior meeting in Galway, Ireland, in May. This featured the work of 30 Haverford students and alums, with much of the novel research being carried out by students in his biology “Superlab” course.

The John and Barbara Bush Professor in the Natural Sciences Suzanne Amador Kane published a research paper coauthored with Haverford physics alums Chengpei Li ’22, Aaron J. Xu ’23, and Eric Beery ’22 and collaborator Tonia Hsieh. “Putting a new spin on insect jumping performance using 3D modeling and computer simulations of spotted lanternfly nymphs” was published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Specialist in Public Speaking and Communication Nimisha Ladva was one of seven playwrights — out of more than 1,000 applicants — selected to be part of The Playwright’s Realm’s 2023-2024 cohort.

Ladva’s paper, “Is the Communication Center Racist? An Inquiry into Black Linguistic Justice, AntiRacism, and Assimilation,” published in 2020, was a subject of the panel “Fostering Dialogue Around Building an Antiracist Tutoring Center,” led by Amy Abrogast from the University of Rochester, at the 2023 National Association of Communication Center Conference (NACC).

Ladva’s conference presentation at the 2023 NACC was “Acquaintance Spaces and Late Pandemic Isolation: The Classroom and The Center as Agents of Belonging.”

Professor Emeritus of History and Visiting Professor in the Writing Program and Quaker Studies Emma Lapsansky-Werner gave a presentation to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History focused on building a curriculum around Black women and the American Revolution. The presentation was for more than 400 teachers working in the Elizabeth, New Jersey, school district.

This summer, Lapansky-Werner also contributed a short essay to Robynne Rogers Healy’s book Quaker Women 1800-1920, published by Penn State University Press. She is also serving on Friends’ Central School’s 2023-2024 board of trustees.

Assistant Professor of Music Mei-ling Lee performed her interactive electronic music composition Rebound at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival on June 24. The performance took place at the Loreto Theater. In the composition, Lee used an iPad as a controller to “play” the sounds. Rebound explores the distribution of sounds in space, the manipulation of tempos, and the transformation of timbres. A recording of the performance is available on YouTube, beginning at the 1:33:00 mark.

Visiting Assistant Professor in the Writing Program Jess Libow’s article “‘A Face of Anguish’: Pain and Portraiture in the Civil War Hospital” has been accepted for publication by the journal American Literature. Libow was also awarded the Margaret Fuller Society's Racial Justice Teaching Award for an entry describing lesson plans from her “Feminism Before Suffrage” seminar.

Professor Emeritus of Music Thomas Lloyd had three articles published this quarter:

“Has ‘Whiteness’ limited the imagination of Western choral music?” was published in the July 2023 issue of International Choral Magazine. It was also published in German in the July 2023 issue of Neue Musikzeitung.

“Voices of Change — Impacting the Communities We Serve,” an edited transcript of a panel discussion on which he spoke at the American Choral Directors Association 2022 Eastern Conference in Boston, was published in two parts in Choral Journal’s September and October issues. The articles were co-edited by Lloyd, J. Donald Dumpson, and Wendy Moy.

A proposal that John Farnum Professor of Physics and Astronomy Andrea Lommen was on was selected for NASA’s Phase I SBIR program. She’ll spend the next six months writing a proposal for a space mission to test a deep space navigation program, to which the theses of four Haverford alums contributed: Nathaniel Ruhl ’22, Noah Schwab ’22, Romana Hladky ’22, and Seamus Flannery ’23.

In September, T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth gave the Kuang-Yi Liu Lectures in Chinese Philosophy at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. The lectures were entitled “Meaning, Language, and Thought,” “Learning to Be Human,” and “Art as Inquiry.”

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Sara Mathieson gave two talks at conferences this summer. On June 12, she presented “Using Generative Adversarial Networks to Infer Natural Selection” at the Evolution in Action conference in Monte Verita, Switzerland. On June 22, at the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in the Liberal Arts conference at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Mathieson presented “Teaching computational biology to upper-level CS students as an algorithms course.”

Professor of Political Science Barak Mendelsohn, with Dominic Tierney, published “Paper Tiger: The Enemy Image of America,” in the journal Survival in June. Mendelsohn also presented two papers at conferences: “General Guidelines for Jihad: Explaining al-Qaeda’s Code of Conduct” at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Los Angeles in August; and “The Future of the Jihadi Movement” at the New Threats and Changing Perceptions of Security workshop, at Queen's University Belfast in May.

Professor and Chair of Mathematics and Statistics Weiwen Miao had her paper “The Application of the Likelihood Ratio Test and the Cochran-Mantel-Haenszel Test to Discrimination Cases” accepted for publication by The American Statistician.

Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan won a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, Level II ($148,015) to fund the development of Bridge Readability Tools (BRT). BRT will enable easy analysis of Greek and Latin readability (to start), facilitate the lemmatization of texts, and facilitate the discovery of readable works.

Mulligan also spent the summer in residence at the Laboratoire d’Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes (LASLA) at the University of Liège, Belgium, supported by a University of Liège Residency Grant. At the university, he contributed to LASLA’s “Ovidian Textual Motifs in Late Antiquity” digital humanities project and presented “Latin Readability Metrics: Using Lemmatized Data from the Laboratoire d’Analyse Statistique des Langues Anciennes to Characterize Textual Difficulty.”

Mulligan presented “LexR: a Preliminary Readability Metric for Latin, Lexical Linear Load, and Bridge/Stats” at RLRL 2023: Workshop on Readability for Low-Resourced Languages with M. Rabayda (student) and H. Paterson (post-doc). He also co-authored “Bridging Corpora: Creating Learner Pathways Across Texts,” with H. Paterson, A. Lacy, and P. Guardiola, while H. Paterson presented at the 4LR: Linking Lexicographic and Language Learning Resources Conference in September.

Mulligan contributed a chapter, “The Jeweled Style in Later Epigram,” to A Late Antique Poetics? The Jeweled Style Revisited, published by Bloomsbury in June. His review of Céline Urlacher-Becht, Dictionnaire de l'épigramme littéraire dans l'Antiquité grecque et romaine was published in Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist recently published a paper on the incorporation of robotic, high-throughput techniques into the first-year chemistry laboratory curriculum. A group of Haverford first-year students used manual and robotic techniques to determine the solubility product of lead iodide. The introduction of laboratory automation and data science techniques represents a shift forward in the first-year laboratory program. Two Haverford undergraduates, Gabriel Jones-Thomson ’24, Keqing He ’25, appear as co-authors.

In September, Visiting Assistant Professor of Linguistics Amanda Payne published the book Adverbs Across Domains with Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Visiting Professor of the Writing Program and Health Studies Carol Schilling was invited to participate in the two-week Project Narrative Summer Institute at Ohio State University, where the theme was Narrative Medicine and Graphic Medicine. Schilling presented her work-in-progress on ambiguous loss in the narratives of familial caregivers. Schilling also published a review of American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics by Kevin Hazzard on New York University's Literature, Arts, and Medicine website.

Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Visual Studies Erin Schoneveld was interviewed by The Japan Times regarding the exhibition Made in Japan: 20th Century Poster Art, which she curated with Nozomi Naoi. The article, “Hiroshima Appeals poster set to continue traditions of daring design and anti-nuclear art,” was published July 23.

The exhibition, which was on view at New York’s Poster House through Sept. 10 was also featured in The New York Times’ T-List.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual Studies Zeynep Sertbulut published “The Dizi Industry’s Global Imaginaries and Narratives of Global Success” in International Communication Gazette (Vol: 85 (3-4)). Her review of Television and the Afghan Culture Wars was also published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Additionally, Sertbulut has been invited to present her research at the 2023 Middle East Studies Association's conference and the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting, both of which will take place in Canada this fall.

Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures Paul Jakov Smith published “The Fragility of Peace: Song China’s Northwestern Frontier and Erosion of the Chanyuan Paradigm in the Mid-Eleventh Century” in the Journal of Chinese History. In June Smith was a senior facilitator for the Third Middle Period China Humanities Conference at Yale University, where he also presented a brief overview of Chinese economic history at the opening plenary session.

Associate Professor and Director of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights Jill Stauffer presented “Beginning an Ending: Law, Territory, and the Possible End Times of Settler Colonialism” for the International Conference of the Lifetimes project, at the University of Oslo in August.

In May, the Douglas and Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies David Harrington Watt made a presentation at a conference on the history of the Society of Friends at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. Watt’s presentation was called “What I’ve Learned from Teaching Courses on Quakerism at a College Where Liberal Quakerism Bulks Large.”

Watt also published The Quakers, 1830-1937: The Creation of Modern Quaker Diversity with Penn State University Press. The book, which Watt co-edited with Stephen Angell and Pink Dandelion, included an essay on Rufus Jones’s influence on the historiography of Quakerism that was written by Watt.

In June, Watt participated in the week-long faculty seminar “Religious Responses to Understanding Rescue During the Holocaust” at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Professor of Fine Art William Williams was featured in two exhibitions this spring and summer: Highlights from the Photography Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and 50th Anniversary: Selections from Light Work Collection, presented at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse.

Williams and a small group of other photography-oriented thinkers were invited to participate in a conversation about the change in the cultures of U.S. photography over the past 50 years. The three-day event was sponsored by the Streamway Foundation and held in Rockingham, Vermont.

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Kathleen Wright had her opinion piece “Sorry, Apple. Even with the Vision Pro, we’ll still be alone together” published in the June 11 edition of The Washington Post.

Assistant Professor of Music and Director of Choral and Vocal Studies Nathan Zullinger led several public “sings” from the newly-released Singing City Songbook, for which he served as editor. The book contains new music by 27 composers for the encouragement of community singing. The last of these presentations took place at the Pennsylvania Summer Conference of the American Choral Directors Association. At the conference, Zullinger coached a professional quartet coached a quartet of professional singers for a performance of Schumann's Spanisches Liederspiel and assisted in coordinating the undergraduate conducting seminar, which included a current Bryn Mawr College music student.