Fall 2023 Faculty Update

Associate Professor of Economics Carola Binder gave seminar presentations at the University of Missouri and the University of Illinois. She attended the National Bureau of Economics Research Monetary Economics workshop and a Liberty Fund conference on liberalism in the interwar period in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. She appeared on NPR’s Marketplace discussing consumer credit access and expectations. She continues to serve as an associate editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.

Professor of Spanish Roberto Castillo Sandoval’s novel La novela del corazón (The Novel of the Heart, Laurel Editores, 2022) was awarded the Premio Municipal de Literatura de Santiago, Chile’s oldest and most prestigious literary prize. Previous recipients include Pablo Neruda, José Donoso, Raúl Zurita, and Roberto Bolaño. In addition, a movie based on one of his earlier novels, Muriendo por la dulce patria mía (Laurel Editores, 2017) is at the production stage, with shooting scheduled for the spring of 2024.

Professor of Chemistry Lou Charkoudian co-organized and co-led the 2023 FLAMEnet (Factors Affecting Learning, Attitudes and Mindsets in Education, a network) Workshop. The workshop, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, brought together STEM instructors, psychologists, educational researchers, support staff, administrators, and other key stakeholders to build community focused on increasing inclusive undergraduate STEM pedagogical practices while decreasing burnout. Charkoudian also served on the Chemical Synthesis & Biosynthesis Study Section for the National Institutes of Health. She was elected to the Advising Council of the Armenian Society of Fellows. She presented at the 2023 Sphingolipid Conference and gave an invited talk at the University of Rutgers Camden.

Visiting Assistant Professor Lee Dietterich and colleagues published the article “A systematic review of mechanistic models of riverine macrophyte growth” in Aquatic Botany. The article reviews existing efforts to model plant growth in rivers and puts forth a framework to help guide future model development.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Health Studies Damien Droney published the article “Projects, Revisited: A Concept for the Anthropology of the Good” in Anthropological Theory. The article traces the concept of project in the history of anthropological theory and reconsiders its contemporary relevance.

Professor of Global Philosophy Ashok Gangadean made a keynote presentation, via Zoom, at the Oct. 4 International Gathering of EUROTAS in Tuscany, Italy. Over the past decade, he has been invited to make keynote presentations to this growing global community in Germany, Latvia, Crete, and Italy. He has been elected to a leadership position in EUROTAS. The presentation is available for viewing on YouTube.

We have arrived at an exciting moment in the evolution of the Margaret Gest Center for Dialogue Beyond Borders as it has entered its 50th year. As the Gest Center’s director, Gangadean sees this celebration as an opportunity to inform and educate the ever-evolving community on the Gest Center for Dialogue’s vital educational enterprise and the existential urgency of cultivating deep dialogue across and between all kinds of borders. In his invitational video, Gangadean introduces the Gest Center, and reflects on decades of development of our Gest Center for Dialogue, which seeks to cultivate safe spaces for all members of our community.

Gangadean’s friend and former student Jen Taylor ’87 LCSW, a practiced psychotherapist specializing in women's empowerment, domestic violence, teen, and LGBTQIA+ individuals, asked him to author a prologue for her then-forthcoming book Letters to Myself – Volume 1: Self-Harm & Suicide.

Having worked closely with Gangadean while she was a philosophy major at Haverford, Taylor was attuned to his pioneering efforts to uncover the existential common ground of diverse human pathologies. Gangadean had been working on these topics for years and was glad to author the foreword for her book, titled “Prologue on the Root Causes of Suicide.” The book has just been published in paperback and digitally. To read the forward, click this link.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy Charles Goldhaber’s paper “The Dissatisfied Skeptic in Kant's Discipline of Pure Reason” was published in the Journal of Transcendental Philosophy. Additionally, he commented on Kenneth Winkler's “Causes and Causal Reasoning in Hume’s Enquiries” at the Conference in Honor of Elizabeth Radcliffe at the College of William and Mary.

On Oct. 23, Executive Director of the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship Eric Hartman gave the invited talk “A Civics of Interdependence: Colonial and Liberatory Conflict and Collaboration from Pennsylvania to Ontario,” at Western University in London, Ontario.

In October, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual Studies Emily Hong attended the international premiere of her feature documentary film, Above and Below the Ground at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. The film, which focuses on the Indigenous women activists and punk rock pastors behind Myanmar's first and only country-wide environmental movement, was also featured in a broadcast news segment on NHK World, including an in-depth interview with Hong.

The film’s Asia Pacific tour continued with stops in Taiwan and Hawai’i at the Women Make Waves Film Festival, Hawai’i International Film Festival, and a simulcast of the film at 20 universities organized by the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and the GETSEA Southeast Asian Studies consortium.

Performances of Professor of Music Heidi Jacob’s Partials at Sea and Dance of the Covariant Derivative for solo piano with pianist Charles Abramovic were held at Temple University, The Quadrangle, and The Crosslands.

Susanna Loewy performed “Preludio” from Jacob’s Suite for Flute and Piano at the Pikes Falls Chamber Music Festival in Jamaica, Vermont, and as part of a performance with Astral Artist harpist Noel at The Quadrangle.

Additionally, Jacob’s Hope is the Thing with Feathers, based on Emily Dickinson’s poem, premiered at the Free Library of Philadelphia as part of the ENA Ensemble concert “The Points Don’t Matter.” It was performed by flutist Chelsea Meynig. Hope is the Thing with Feathers was also performed at Girls High School in Philadelphia as part of the Network for New Music outreach program. It was presented by Network for New Music at Haverford’s Jaharis Recital Hall and University of the Art’s Caplan Recital Hall again with Meynig and narrators Professor of English Linday Reckson and Yin Moore Scott from UArts.

Professor of Fine Arts Hee Sook Kim received the 2023 Otto Lambert Grever Lithography Award from the American Color Print Society, Philadelphia. She was also featured in the solo exhibitions We the People, presented by Kyo Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, and Everlasting Playground at Art Mora Gallery in Ridgefield, New Jersey. In addition, her work was included in group exhibitions at The Plastic Club in Philadelphia at the Douro Museum in Regua, Portugal.

Updates for Associate Professor of Linguistics Brook Lillehaugen:

Publication
McCarl, Clayton, Emma Slayton, Carolina Alzate, George Aaron Broadwell, Xóchitl Flores-Marcial, Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Felipe H. Lopez, Siobhan Meï, May Helena Plumb, Ernesto Priani Saisó, and Jonathan Michael Square. 2023. “Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Studies and Digital Public Humanities,” in DH Unbound 2022, Selected Papers, ed. Barbara Bordalejo, Roopika Risam, and Emmanuel Château-Dutier, special issue. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 13(3): 1–32. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.9601.

Conference presentation
Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, Pamela Munro, Felipe H. Lopez, Olivia Martínez, and Lillian Leibovich. 2023. Retos y oportunidades en el desarollo de materiales didácticos digitales para dizhsa: ¿Cali Chiu?: un curso de zapoteco del valle. Congreso sobre lenguas otomangues y vecinas IX, Oaxaca City, April 22.

Invited Colloquium
2023. Ticha: archival texts, linguistic analysis, and language activism. Linguistics Program Colloquium Series, Princeton University, Nov. 28.

Invited Plenaries
Chávez Santiago, Janet and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen. 2023. Ticha to Dixza: from the Archive to Lo Gedx. Stepping into the Work: 2023 Community-Based Global Learning Collaborative Institute, Haverford College, Nov. 10.

2023. Centering Language(s) & Linguistics in a Social-Justice Oriented Humanities. Cultures and Languages Across the Curriculum Conference, Rutgers University, Sept. 29.

Invited Panelist
Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle and Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial. 2023. Ticha: Exploring Antiracist Markup and Community Engaged Digital Scholarship. Women Writers Project Antiracist Markup Practices Symposium, Northeastern University, May 15.

On Oct. 16, Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy Karen Masters attended a workshop about the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) led by postdoctoral researcher and ALMA Ambassador Dylan Pare at Villanova with students Narisara Mayer ’25, Margaret Wang ’26, and Masha Kilibarda ’26.

Later that month, Masters gave the Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium, titled “Observing Spiral Arms in Galaxies.” She was also invited to join the Roman Space Telescope Advisory Committee and attended her first meeting in early November.

“SDSS-IV from 2014 to 2016: A Detailed Demographic Comparison over Three Years,” a paper based on demographic surveys of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey while Masters was its spokesperson, was accepted by Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. It was led by Amy Jones, et al. (including Masters).

T. Wistar Brown Professor of Philosophy Danielle Macbeth gave a series of invited lectures in China in October and November: first, the paper “Ampliative Deductive Proof in Mathematical Practice: Lessons from Kant and Frege” at Peking University, Beijing, and at Fudan University, Shanghai; and also “Art as Inquiry: The Path of Chinese Lyric Aesthetic,” again at Peking University and Fudan University, and also at the University of Macau and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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 in The American Statistician.

Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies Joshua Moses recently launched a podcast pilot called Swamped, which is envisioned as a series that tells stories of experts confronting situations in which they feel that their training, skills, and knowledge were tested in extraordinary ways. Moses also created Poetry Clinic, an online portal for poets to engage with the public to offer “poetic prescriptions” for living.

Professor of Classics Bret Mulligan published the textbook The Crisis of Catiline: Rome, 63 BCE with University of North Carolina Press and the Reacting Consortium.

Mulligan also presented “Bridge/Stats: a Tool for Discovering, Visualizing, and Comparing Textual Readability” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and “Finding Readable Latin Texts: New Tools and Questions” at the Philadelphia Classical Society.

Professor of Chemistry Alexander Norquist published a perspective in the Journal of the American Chemical Society about the search for exceptional materials. Norquist and his co-authors discuss the utility of high throughput techniques and machine learning for the discovery of out-of-distribution solutions to chemical and materials problems. They also propose six recommendations for the use of machine learning in such situations that diverge from standard practice. The full reference is: Schrier, J.; Norquist, A. J.; Buonassisi, T.; Brgoch, J. J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 2023, 145, 21699-231716.

Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science Yonca Özdemir’s article “The AKP’s ‘Embedded Neoliberalism’ and the Rise of ‘Authoritarian Embeddedness’ in Turkey” was published in Critical Sociology. By analyzing the dynamics of neoliberalism through a Polanyian lens, this article explains how the contradictions of neoliberalism have led to an authoritarian form of populism in the Turkish context.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visual Studies Zeynep Sertbulut was chair of and presenter in a panel entitled “Film, TV, and Theater” at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual conference in Montreal in early November. She also presented a paper on media censorship in Turkey in a panel on technologies of social production at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto. She was subsequently invited to be an editor of a special journal issue on media, social instability, and the state. Her article “They Don't Care What We Watch: On Ratings and Culture-Making in the Turkish Dizi Industry” is currently in press with the Visual Anthropology Review. Her book chapter "Not Essential: The Controversy Over Dizis During the Covid-19 Pandemic" is in press with Routledge, and her review of Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic is in press with Anthropologica. For the spring semester, Zeynep is organizing a series of campus events in coordination with the CPGC on how to navigate the informational space during moments of crisis and conflict.

Emeritus Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures Paul Jakov Smith has been named an associate of the Harvard University Asia Center and appointed co-editor of the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies. The journal is one of the premier sites for research on the social, political, and cultural history of China and the steppe from the 10th through the 14th centuries.

In November, Douglas & Dorothy Steere Professor of Quaker Studies David Harrington Watt chaired a panel at the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion that analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of "The New History of Quakerism." The conference was held in San Antonio, Texas.

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Jonathan Wilson, with Haverford alums Gabriel Oppler ’17, Elizabeth Reikowski ’17, Jessica Smart ’18, Charles Marquardt ’16, and Brian Keller ’18 published “Physiological selectivity and plant–environment feedbacks during Middle and Late Pennsylvanian plant community transitions” in the Geological Society of London Special Publications.

Wilson’s “A Systems Approach to Understanding How Plants Transformed Earth’s Environment in Deep Time” was also published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences.

Wilson presented this research at the 2023 Mid-Atlantic Geobiology Symposium, in a talk entitled “Evolution, extinction, drought, frost: investigating vegetation-climate feedbacks using plant paleoecophysiology and the fossil record.”

Associate Professor of Political Science Susanna Wing published “Coups d’état, Political Legitimacy, and Instability in Mali” in the fall edition of the journal Africa Today.