11281 Southwestern University: Academics: Faculty Notables

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Faculty Notables

April 2013

  • Bob Bednar, associate professor and chair of communication studies, had an article titled “Roadside Shrines: A Search For Meaning” published in the March 31 Insight & Books section of The Austin American-Statesman. Read the story here.

  • Erin Crockett, assistant professor of psychology, and students Sara Goodman and Quinlyn Morrow are presenting posters this week at a meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association in Fort Worth. Goodman is presenting a poster titled “Perceptions of dating in adolescence and self-esteem in emerging adulthood” and Morrow is presenting a poster titled “Associations between friendship gender composition and interdependence.”

  • Shannon Mariotti, associate professor of political science, presented a paper titled “The Housekeeper of Homelessness: The Democratic Ethos of Marilynne Robinson’s Novels and Essays” at the Western Political Science Association conference in Hollywood, Calif., March 29.

  • Michael Saenger, associate professor of English, wrote a review of The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, vol. 1, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 that appeared in the most recent issue of Notes and Queries, a publication of Oxford University Press.

March 2013

  • Erika Berroth, associate professor of German, presented a research paper titled “Marica Bodrožić: Transnational Identity Narratives in Layers, Folds and Fractals” at the 44th annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association in Boston March 21-24. With this essay, part of a theory chapter in her book on transnational identity narratives by contemporary women writers, Berroth contributed to a double panel titled “The Eastern European Turn in Contemporary German-Language Literature” which brought together eight leading scholars on the topic from Europe and the United States. While at NeMLA, she also participated in expert discussions on “Blended Learning in Modern Languages and Literature Classrooms” and “Best Practices: Teaching Professional Communication in German.”

  • Michael Cooper, professor of music and holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts, has completed work on the Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music. The book will be published this fall by Scarecrow Press as part of their series titled Historical Dictionaries of Literature and the Arts. 

  • Abby Dings, assistant professor of Spanish, presented a paper titled “Language learners in interaction: Orientation to novice and expert identities” at the Dialogue in Multilingual, Multimodal, and Multicompetent Communities of Practice Workshop in Austin March 22-24.

  • Melissa Johnson, associate professor of anthropology, was invited to participate in a one-day conference on Race, Place and Nature that was held at Rutgers University March 8 as part of a year-long Sawyer Seminar on Race, Place and Space in the Americas. Johnson presented a paper titled “Racing Nature in a Creolized World: Race, Color and Nature in Belize.”

  • Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, associate professor of English, presented a paper titled “The Limits of Liberal Literacy Pedagogies in a Global Context: Lessons from Vietnam” on a panel called Questioning English Instruction Abroad and at Home at the 2013 Conference on College Composition and Communication held March 13-16 in Las Vegas. At the conference she saw Southwestern graduate Sarah Hart, who completed her Ph.D. in August and is teaching as an adjunct at Colorado State and working on a book project based on her dissertation on rhetoric and poetry.

  • Angeles Rodriguez Cadena, assistant professor of Spanish, attended a seminar on the history of mass media in Latin America at the University of Buenos Aires while she is on sabbatical in Buenos Aires this semester. She also participated in a workshop on “Memory and Education” at the Haroldo Conti Cultural Center for Social Memory, which is housed at a facility that functioned as a concentration camp in the 1970s during Argentina’s military dictatorship. The workshop provided an opportunity to interact with educators, community leaders, artists and students who are creating opportunities for the production and promotion of the culture of memory and human rights through art, education, literature, culture and politics. She said she plans to incorporate what she has learned this semester in the Contemporary Latin American Literature class she will be teaching in the fall, and in her Cultural Memory in Latin America class that participates in Paideia.

  • Patricia Schiaffini, instructor of Chinese, delivered a paper titled “The Language Debate in Sinophone Tibetan Literature: Cultural Authenticity, Audience, and Representation” at a roundtable on “Critical Conversations in Sinophone Studies” at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in San Diego March 21-24.

  • Brenda Sendejo, assistant professor of anthropology, presented a paper titled “Activist Pedagogies as Resistance: Promoting Social Change from the Borderlands of Chicana/o Studies and Anthropology” at the National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies annual conference in San Antonio March 20-23.

  • Anwar Sounny-Slitine, instructor of environmental studies and GIS Lab Manager, has received a $10,500 Google education grant to install Google Earth Pro edition on 30 computers on campus that are used by students in GIS, Physics and other programs.

  • Barbara Anthony, assistant professor of computer science, facilitated a Birds-of-a-Feather session on “Trends in CS Enrollment at Small, Liberal Arts Institutions” at the 2013 SIGCSE (Computer Science Education) Technical Symposium, “The Changing Face of Computing” in Denver, Colo., March 7-9. Suzanne Fox Buchele, associate professor of computer science, presented a paper at the same conference titled “Two Models of a Cryptography and Computer Security Class in a Liberal Arts Context.”

  • Eileen Cleere, professor of English, delivered a paper called “Chaste Polygamy and Victorian Sensation Fiction” at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) conference in Charlottesville, Va. , March 14-17.  The essay extends her current project on representations of Mormon marriage in Victorian literature, 1860-1870. While at INCS she also chaired a panel on British Romantic literature, and agreed to serve on the selection committee for the 2014 INCS conference hosted by the University of Houston.

  • Elaine Craddock, professor of religion, published an article titled “The Half Male, Half Female Servants of the Goddess Aṅkāḷaparamēcuvari” in the December 2012 issue of Nidān: Journal for the Study of Hinduism.

  • Herbert Genzmer, visiting assistant professor of German, has been invited to start writing a column for Entwürfe, a literary magazine from Zürich. The column is titled “Notes from America.” The first column, published March 7, was titled “Faith will help.”

  • Valerie Renegar, associate professor of communication studies, attended the Western States Communication Association annual conference in Reno, Nev., Feb. 15-19. She was involved in two roundtable discussions to help emerging scholars develop their work through the publication process. She also presented a co-authored paper in the Rhetoric and Public Address division titled “Contradictions and Watersheds: Up in the Air with the Comic Frame.”

  • Fred Sellers, associate professor of business, presented a paper titled “Dynegy Corporation: Inflating Operating Cash Flow” at the Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Accounting Association in Albuquerque, N.M., March 15.

  • Maha Zewail-Foote, associate professor of chemistry, co-authored an article titled “Science for the ‘Haves’” that was published in the January issue of the international journal Angewandte Chemi. Read the article here.

October 2012

  • Eileen Cleere, professor of English, delivered a paper at the North American Victorian Studies Association conference in Madison, Wis., Sept. 27-30. The paper, “Mormon Fever: Sensationalizing the Saints in Mrs. Henry Wood’s 1863 Verner’s Pride,” is part of a new research project about female domestic privacy within representations of Mormon polygamy.

September 2012

  • Maria Lowe, professor of sociology, and Reggie Byron, assistant professor of sociology, have had an article titled “Food for Thought: Frequent Interracial Dining Experiences as a Predictor of Students’ Racial Climate Perceptions,” accepted for publication in The Journal of Higher Education, the leading scholarly journal on the institution of higher education. Recent graduates Griffin Ferry and Melissa Garcia contributed to the paper.

  • Abby Dings, assistant professor of Spanish, recently had an article titled “Native Speaker/Nonnative Speaker Interaction and Orientation to Novice/Expert Identity” published in the Journal of Pragmatics.  

  • Jesse Purdy, professor of psychology, is presenting a talk titled “Vertebrate Predators May Share Facial Characteristics Providing Opportunities for Detection by Prey” at the biannual meeting of the International Society of Comparative Psychologists, which is being held this week in Jaen, Spain.

  • Pianist Kiyoshi Tamagawa and several other members of the music faculty will be the featured performers in a Sept. 9 chamber music concert at the Cailloux Theater in Kerrville. The program will include a rarely performed version of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor arranged for piano, flute, violin and cello by Mozart’s pupil and protégé, Johann Nepomuk Humel; the Quintet in F minor for piano and string quartet by Johannes Brahms; and the regional premiere of a brand new work for piano, violin and cello by Composer in Residence Jason Hoogerhyde. Read more here.   

August 2012

  • Ben Pierce, professor of biology and holder of the Lillian Nelson Pratt Chair, published an article in theSouthwestern Naturalist along with former students Tiffany Biagas, Alex Hall and Alexis Ritzer.  The article is titled “Time of day does not affect detection in visual encounter surveys of a spring-dwelling salamander, Eurycea naufragia.” Pierce was recently awarded a third year of funding from the Williamson County Research Foundation for his research on the Georgetown salamander.

  • Mary Hale Visser, professor of art and holder of the Herman Brown Chair, presented a paper on “Cybersculpture: materials, processes and the history of sculpture in the digital age” at the European Forum on Rapid Prototyping and Manufacturing symposium held in Paris in June.

  • Katy Ross, associate professor of Spanish, presented a paper at the Congreso de la Asociación Hispánica de Humanidades in Madrid June 28-30.

  • Patrick Hajovsky, assistant professor of art history, has published a chapter in a new book titled Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World. His contribution is “Without a Face: Voicing Moctezuma II’s Image at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City.” The book was edited by Dana Leibsohn of Smith College and Jeanette Favrot Peterson of the University of California - Santa Barbara, both well-published scholars of Latin American art history. Read more here.

  • Fay Guarraci, associate professor of psychology, and Maha Zewail-Foote, associate professor of chemistry, had a paper titled “Kin Discrimination in Prepubescent and Adult Long-Evans Rats” published in the July issue ofBehavioural Processes. Co-authors on the paper include former students Jessica Bolton, Alex Burby, Brittany Ford and Carissa Winland.  

  • Music Professor Lois Ferrari and the Austin Civic Orchestra have been named finalists for the 2012 American Prize in two categories: Orchestral Performance (Community Orchestra Division) and Conducting (Community Orchestra Division). Read more here.

  • Melissa Byrnes, assistant professor of history, gave a paper on “The Algerian War through Metropolitan Prisms: How Ideas of Empire Shaped Local Immigration Policies and Policing” at the French Colonial Historical Society’s annual conference in New Orleans May 30-June 2.

May 2012

  • Erika Berroth, associate professor of German and chair of the Chinese, French and German Programs, presented her research at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference in Lexington, Ky., April 19-22, 2012. Her paper titled “Das Wunder von Bern (2003): Cultures of Affect, Spectatorial Responses, Perceptions of History” contributed to a panel of scholars working on German history and film.

  • Two faculty members gave presentations at the Popular Culture/American Culture Association meeting in Boston April 11-12. Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, associate professor of English, gave a paper titled “Moving Mountains: Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn and the Canon of Vietnam War Literature” and David Gaines, associate professor of English, gave a presentation titled “A Dylan Fan’s Notes.”

April 2012

  • Helene Meyers, Professor of English and McManis University Chair, presented “Here and/or Elsewhere: Locating Contemporary Jewish American Literature” at the annual conference of MELUS (the Society for the Study of the Multi-ethnic Literature of the United States). The paper explored the function of Holocaust and Israel narratives in feminist and queer Jewish American novels.  

  • Thomas Howe, professor of art and art history, will present a paper titled “For Whom Did Vitruvius Write?” at a colloquium on Vitruvius being held in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, April 26-29. The paper combines his earlier work on a commentary and illustration of the Roman architect Vitruvius (Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, with Ingrid Rowland, trans, Cambridge University Press, 1999) with his recent work on the architectural context of political activity in Republican Rome.

  • Steve Kostelnik, assistant professor of music, was one of several classical guitar players who participated in a recent “Views and Brews” program sponsored by KUT-FM at the Cactus Café in Austin. Listen to the show here.

  • Alison Kafer, associate professor of feminist studies, gave an invited talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison April 17. Her talk, “Practicing Feminist, Queer, Crip,” was part of UW’s lecture series on disability studies and intersectionality. She gave a shorter version of this talk in February at the “Past, Present, and Future of Feminist Studies” conference at UC-Santa Barbara.

  • David Asbury, assistant professor of music, and Bruce Cain, associate professor of music, performed selections from their “River of Words” song cycle on the Kennedy Center’s Millenium Stage last week. Watch a recording of the performance here.

  • Abby Dings, assistant professor of Spanish, has been selected to receive the Southwestern Partner of the Year Award from Georgetown Partners in Education. The award will be presented April 19 at Georgetown High School. Dings was one of several Southwestern faculty, staff and students who started a program in which Spanish III students mentor students at Mitchell Elementary School.

  • Alisa Gaunder, associate professor of political science, presented a paper titled “The Effects of Party Organization on Women in the CDU and the LDP: Chancellors versus ‘Assassins’” at the Southwestern Political Science Association Meeting in San Diego, Calif., April 4-7.

  • Michael Saenger, associate professor of English, shared a paper in the seminar, “Shakespeare’s Theories of Translation” at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in Boston April 5-7. 

  • The Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción did an interview with Laura Senio-Blair, associate professor of Spanish, who is teaching in Concepción this spring on a Fulbright Fellowship. Read the interview here.

March 2012

  • Southwestern was highlighted in a recent issue of Teaching Sociology as an institution with the most highly productive scholarship of teaching and learning. The distinction is especially impressive because the other schools highlighted are research universities. Read the paper here.

  • Eileen Cleere, professor of English, presented a paper at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Association meeting in Lexington, Ky., March 22-25.  Her essay, “Tactile Values: Touching the Renaissance in Late Nineteenth-Century Art Criticism,” has been solicited for publication in the scholarly journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

  • Laura Hobgood-Oster, professor of religion and environmental studies, has been appointed to The Humane Society of the United States’ Faith Advisory Council. The 13-member council includes leading scholars and representatives from a range of religious denominations, faiths and backgrounds and was set up to provide strategic guidance for the organization and its leadership. Read more here.

  • Alison Kafer, associate professor and chair of Feminist Studies, is spending the week in residence at the University of Arizona. She and Professor Susan Burch of Middlebury College have been invited to lead six workshops with faculty and staff about infusing disability into the work of the university. While there, Kafer will also lead a workshop with LGBTQ students on intersections between disability and queer theory and politics. More information about the workshops is available here.

  • Shannon Mariotti, assistant professor of political science, presented a paper at the Western Political Science Association conference in Portland, Ore., March 24. The conference panel was titled “Cultivating Democratic Citizens: Pedagogy, Policing, and Practice,” and her paper drew from her current book project and was titled “Adorno on Education: Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy.”

  • Allison Miller, assistant professor of art history, presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies held in Toronto, Canada, March 16. The paper was titled “Monumental Rock-Cut Tombs and Political Self-Fashioning and Han China,” and was included on a panel that she co-organized and chaired titled “Contested Space: New Research on the Tombs of the Chinese Ruling Elite.”

  • Shannon Mariotti, assistant professor of political science, has been invited to contribute the article on Ralph Waldo Emerson for The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Her article will be published in the forthcoming series from Wiley-Blackwell in 2012.  

  • Laura Senio Blair, associate professor of Spanish, has an article titled “Driving Toward Heterotopias: Taxis andTaxistas in Contemporary Chilean Cinema” in the spring 2012 issue of Letras Hispana s, a peer-reviewed, open-access online journal dedicated to publishing scholarly essays that engage topics in connection with Spanish, Latin American and U.S. Latino literatures and cultures. Read the article here.

  • Thomas Howe, professor of art and art history, has been invited to contribute a chapter to a new reference book on Greek architecture titled A Companion to Greek Architecture that will be published later this year by Wiley-Blackwell publishers. The title of his chapter is “Hellenistic Architecture in Italy: Consuetudo Italica.” The book is being edited by Margaret M. Miles of U.C. Irvine.

  • Shana Bernstein, associate professor of history, gave two invited talks at UT San Antonio Feb. 29. The first was an undergraduate lecture on her book, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles, and the second was a graduate and faculty seminar presentation on her current project, “The ‘Garbage Ladies’ of the Settlements: Environmental Justice Reform in Progressive-Era Chicago.”

February 2012

  • Bob Bednar, associate professor and chair of communication studies, presented a paper titled “Remembering Road Trauma: The Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines in the American Southwest” at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Feb. 9.

  • Reggie Byron, assistant professor of sociology, co-authored an article titled “Workplace Racial Discrimination and Middle Class Vulnerability” that will appear later this year in the journal American Behavioral Scientist. The article is available online now here.

  • Alisa Gaunder, associate professor of political science, had a book review of Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring by Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Michael F. Thies published in the Winter 2012 issue of The Journal of Japanese Studies.

  • Laura Hobgood-Oster, professor and holder of the Paden Chair in Religion and Environmental Studies, has been invited to speak at Lees-McRae College in North Carolina Feb. 21 as part of the Staley Distinguished Christian Scholar Series. Hobgood-Oster will present two lectures on the topic of animals and Christianity.

  • Ken Roberts, professor of economics and holder of the Cullen Chair in Economics, recently had an article published in the Journal of Contemporary China. The article is titled “The Role of Children in the Migration Decisions of Rural Chinese Women.” Roberts co-authored the article with Rachel Connelly of Bowdoin College and Zhenzhen Zhen of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

  • Kathryn Stallard, head of Special Collections in the A. Frank Smith Library Center, had an article on the library’s crowdsourced transcription of an 1846 U.S- Mexico War Diary (see story here) published in the Feb. 12 issue of The Southwestern Archivist. 

  • Fumiko Futamura, assistant professor of mathematics, has had an article titled “Frame Diagonalization of Matrices” accepted for publication in the journal Linear Algebra and Its Applications. In the article, she introduces a new way of diagonalizing matrices that cannot be diagonalized through traditional means.

January 2012

  • Bob Bednar, associate professor and chair of communication studies, authored the lead article in the December 2011 issue of Memory Connection, a new international memory studies journal. His article is titled “Materializing Memory: The Public Lives of Roadside Crash Shrines.”

  • Francis Mathieu, assistant professor of French, had a chapter titled “Early Modern Women Writers in a History of Ideas Survey Course” published in a 2011 book titled Teaching Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Women Writers. The book was edited by Faith Beasley and published by the Modern Language Association of America. 

  • Maha Foote, associate professor of chemistry, and Fay Guarraci, associate professor of psychology, have an article titled “‘Nice guys finish last’: Influence of mate choice on reproductive success in Long–Evans rats” published in the Feb. 2012 issue of Physiology & Behavior. Five former Southwestern students are listed as contributors to the research – Jessica Bolton, Brittany Ford, Sumith Sampana, Jade Tinker and Carissa Winland. The article is available online here.

  • Alison Kafer, associate professor and chair of feminist studies, published an article called “Desire and Disgust: My Ambivalent Adventures in Devoteeism” in Sex and Disability, edited by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Duke University Press, 2012).

  • Davi Johnson Thornton, assistant professor of communication studies, had two articles published in December. An article titled “Neuroscience, Affect and the Entrepreneurialization of Motherhood” was published in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and an article titled “Psych’s Comedic Tale of Black-White Friendship and the Lighthearted Affect of ‘Post-Race’ America,” was published in Critical Studies in Media Communication.

  • English Professor Helene Meyers’ new book, Identity Papers: Contemporary Narratives of American Jewishness, is one of the featured titles on the bookshelf at the web magazine Secular Culture and Ideas.

  • Religion Professor Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book titled The Friends We Keep has been selected by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries for its 2011 list of Outstanding Academic Titles. Choice says its Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the “best of the best,” with the 2011 list comprising just over 9 percent of the titles they reviewed during the past year

  • Romi Burks, associate professor of biology, had a paper titled “One McBug Burger Please: Eating insects in ecology class to contextualize climate change discussion” accepted for inclusion in the EcoEd Digital Library sponsored by the Ecological Society of America. The article was based on a lab Burks developed for her Invertebrate Ecology class. Read the paper here.

  • Religion Professor Laura Hobgood-Oster’s recent book titled The Friends We Keep has been selected by Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries for its 2011 list of Outstanding Academic Titles. Choice says its Outstanding Academic Titles are truly the “best of the best,” with the 2011 list comprising just over 9 percent of the titles they reviewed during the past year

  • Michael Saenger, associate professor of English, has had an article titled “The Limits of Translation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” accepted for publication in Shakespeare Survey, an annual publication of Cambridge University Press. The acknowledgments in the article name Southwestern graduate Sarah Gammill, who took an independent study class with Dr. Saenger on Lacanian approaches to the play.

  • Ken Roberts, professor of economics and holder of the Cullen Chair in Economics, was an invited participant in a seminar sponsored by the Social Science Research Council and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Dec. 6-8 in Beijing. The seminar was the first in a two-year project funded by the Ford Foundation on migration and social change. Roberts presented a paper titled “The Changing Dynamics of Labor Migration in Mexico and China.”

  • Lois Ferrari, professor of music and music director of the Austin Civic Orchestra, performed a sold-out holiday concert Dec. 11 in Bates Recital Hall on The University of Texas at Austin campus. The event included the presentation of an art work commissioned by Ferrari and the ACO and created by Star Varner, professor of art. A set of engravings created by Varner was presented to two long-time ACO supporters who lost their home in the Bastrop fire last summer. The ACO’s next concert will be performed in the Alma Thomas Theater on Saturday, Feb. 4. For more information, go here.

More Faculty Notables

"Faculty Notables" are published each week, during the academic year, by the Office of Communications. You can read them in the weekly publication, In Focus.

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