Alumni

Faculty News
As of August 2005

Shiwei Chen (history) presented “History in Three Mobilizations,” at the 22nd International Congress of History of Science in Beijing in July. His topic was the Chinese biological warfare allegations against the U.S. during the Korean War as a case study of social/political mobilization. The purpose of the study is to demonstrate how a scientific event could have mushroomed into a large political experience that not only stirred the anxieties of a desperate public, but also created an unexpected atmosphere in which science and politics intermingled to produce a serious outcome.

Jason Cody (chemistry) returned from a sabbatical at the Institut des Matériaux Jean Rouxel in Nantes, France. He presented two new open-framework compounds of copper tin sulfide at the Gordon Research Conference in Varga, Italy in June, and worked on two other projects which seek to expand our understanding of solar cell absorber materials.

Brigitte Debord (French) discussed her favorite author, the Belgian writer Amélie Nothomb, at the American Association of Teachers of French in Quebec City on July 9, in a presentation called “From Text to Screen: Amélie Nothomb’s Stupeur et Tremblements, a perfect adaptation?”  Her co-presenter was Cynthia Hahn (French), who talked about “Reading film as literary text: Chris Marker’s cinéroman, La Jetée.”

Lori Del Negro (chemistry) was sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Aeronomy Laboratory for a week of collaborative work with the Meteorological Chemistry Group in Boulder, Colorado, in July, to study applications of proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry.

Les Dlabay (business) presented “Africa’s Informal Economy: Untapped Development Opportunities” at the “Focus on Africa” conference in July at Northwestern University Law School. In June, he participated in a class on “World Paper Money” in Colorado Springs to analyze historic, geographic, economic, cultural, and political factors reflected in the images and designs of bank-notes from around the world. He published three textbooks on business and finance.

Richard Dye (economics) completed a sabbatical year as a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. The June National Tax Journal included an article he co-authored on Illinois’ property tax cap and a book review he wrote about the Michigan economy. He co-authored a series of papers on the cyclicality of state government revenues and a study of Illinois’ personal income and sales taxes, and delivered the “Lincoln Lecture” at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on tax increment financing.  

Michael H. Ebner (history) authored “Jersey Story: Encyclopedias and Historical Imagination,” published in the September Reviews in American History. He delivered a paper at William Paterson University in October titled “Becoming Nicholas Martini in Twentieth Century America: A Passaic Story.” Martini was a legendary political figure in mid-twentieth century Passaic. 

Matthew Kelley (psychology) and Susanna Calkins (history) saw their article, “Mentoring and the faculty-TA relationship: Faculty perceptions and practices” published in the August Mentoring & Tutoring. Kelley organized the inaugural “Current Advances in Psychology” Colloquia Series for the fall semester. Four researchers visited the College this fall to speak on topics ranging from the biological bases of schizophrenia to the analysis of traumatic memories of the Holocaust. 

Rami Levin (music) was one of several Chicago area composers whose work was chosen to be presented on the “Fresh Ink” Concert Series, sponsored by the Chicago Composers Forum and the Chicago Park District. Their goal is to promote public appreciation of different forms and styles of today’s music and to build bridges between musicians and culturally-varied communities. 

Ronald Miller (religion) and Laura Bernstein co-authored the book Healing the Jewish-Christian Rift: Growing Beyond Our Wounded History.

Richard Pettengill (English and theater) had two articles accepted. “A Dramaturg Re-enters the Academy” appeared in the book The Theater of Teaching and the Lessons of Theater and “Pitfalls of Cinematic Aspiration: the Reception of Peter Sellars’ The Merchant of Venice" is appearing this fall in Performance Research. He delivered “Focus on The Tempest” at the 2006 meeting of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education in San Francisco. 

Christopher Reed (art history) saw the publication in August of a revised version of his article on the design of street furniture for Chicago's “Boys Town” neighborhood, which previously appeared in a scholarly journal for urban planners. The revised essay is in a new anthology, Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives.

The “cease and desist” letter regarding Davis Schneiderman’s (English) forthcoming project “Multifest A Henri d’Mescan Reader” was published in the print journal Sleepingfish 075 (www.sleepingfish.net). Sleepingfish 075 also carries two more pieces, Sonnet 55 and Sonnet 118, which are Shakespeare’s sonnets of the same numbers superimposed with Duchampian facial hair. Potion, his co-edited literary journal, was published at www.potionmag.org.

Ghada Talhami (politics) spoke at the College of Lake County’s Adult Learning Center in June on the Palestinian-Israeli issue and the politics of Lebanon. In July she delivered a paper, “Teaching the Middle East” at the annual meeting of the Learning Association (of Australia) in Granada, Spain. Her book, Palestinian Refugees: Pawns to Political Actors, received a glowing review in the Spring 2005 issue of The Journal of Palestine Studies.

Carolyn Tuttle (economics) was commissioned to write and present a paper at a conference in Amsterdam in November 2006 on “Child Labor’s Global Past (1500–2000).” The conference brings together historians who have been working on these issues to provide a framework for international comparison to reassess the historical development of child labor over the last 500 years. She submitted two entries to the Encyclopedia of the Age of the Industrial Revolution: A Global History, to be published this year.

Christopher Whidden (politics) presented “The Account of Persia in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia” in September at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Washington D.C., on a panel titled “Imperialism, Ancient and Modern.”  His article “True Statesmanship as True Rhetoric in Plato’s Gorgias” appears in the November issue of the journal Polis.

David Yuen (mathematics) gave a talk titled “Theta identities” at the Automorphic Forms Workshop at the University of North Texas in March 2005. He also had a research paper, “The Extreme Core,” accepted for publication, due out later this year, and he was a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analysis in Princeton for two months this summer.