Faculty Spotlight

Cameron Afzal (RELIGION) published The Mystery of the Book of Revelation: Reenvisioning the End of Time in May 2008 (Edwin Mellen). This summer he taught an intensive course at the International Center for Hellenic and Mediterranean Studies in Greece, titled “Paul, Christianity, and the Greek City.”

In January, Abraham Anderson (PHILOSOPHY) spoke on “Bayle, Gorgias, and the Origins of Nihilism” at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In April, he presented “The Objection of David Hume” at the North American Kant Society’s Eastern Study Group.

Sarah-Marie Belcastro (MATHEMATICS) presented “Braid Words in Generalized Helix Stripe Patterns” at the 2009 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Washington, DC, in January. She published “The Seven-Colored Torus” in the collection Homage to a Pied Puzzler in February (AK Peters). In May, she presented at the Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics Conference in Montreal.

In March, Roy Brand (PHILOSOPHY) curated “Boyan: The Vivid Eye,” a show debuting the Bulgarian-born artist’s work at the Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York City.

Bella Brodzki (LITERATURE) presented “Translating the Ghostwriter” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference held at Harvard University in March.

Adam Brown (PSYCHOLOGY) contributed “Is an Interdisciplinary Field of Memory Studies Possible?” and “Collective Memory from a Psychological Perspective” to the summer edition of International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. In August, he published “The Role of Expertise and Narratorship in Social Remembering” in Social Psychology.

In June, Raymond Clarke (BIOLOGY) published “Water Flow Controls Distribution and Feeding Behavior of Two Co-occurring Coral Reef Fishes” in Coral Reefs. The work caps four-years of research funded by the National Science Foundation.

Kevin Confoy (THEATRE) directed the premiere of Emilie’s Voltaire in New York City in January. In May, he joined the Private Ear Audio Theatre, a group of recent theatre program alumnae/i, for their final radio show of the season.

In March, Robert Desjarlais (ANTHROPOLOGY) presented a talk at Harvard University titled “The Grandmaster’s Lament: Knowledge, Technology, and Anxiety in Competitive Chess.”

Mary Dillard (HISTORY) received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to participate in its summer institute, “American Immigration Revisited.” She spent July at the Library of Congress researching African women immigrants.

Glenn Dynner (RELIGION) contributed “The Hasidic Tale as a Historical Source: A Historiography and Methodology” to Religious Compass in the spring.

In April, Kim Ferguson (PSYCHOLOGY) presented “Infant Development in the Context of Malawian Orphanages” with John MacAllister ’10 at the Unite for Sight global health conference at Yale University. She published “The Development of Specialized Processing of Own-Race Faces” in the May edition of Infancy.

Eros on Stage: Eroticism in Spanish Golden Age Drama, by Esther Fernández (SPANISH), was published in April by Juan de la Cuesta.

In June, Marvin Frankel (PSYCHOLOGY) published “Rogers’ Concept of the Actualizing Tendency in Relation to Darwinian Theory” in Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies and “Taking Pragmatism Seriously” in the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

Melissa Frazier (RUSSIAN) chaired a panel on “Home, Family, Nation: Making a Home in Mid-Nineteenth Century Russia” during the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference at the New School. She also taught a mini-course on The Brothers Karamazov at the Scarsdale Adult School in Westchester.

In January, Daniel Gordon (PHOTOGRAPHY) published a book of photos, Portrait Studio (Onestar).
+ Read about Gordon’s current MoMA show

Peggy Gould (DANCE) performed “From Within & Outside a Bright Room” at Dixon Place in New York City in January and collaborated with videographer Peter Richards on a documentary about the process of making the piece. She has also received several grants, including a Harkness Space Grant from the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center and a Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant.

Philip Gould (ART HISTORY EMERITUS) curated an exhibition of African art in honor of Black History Month at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, where he was also elected member of the advisory committee for the art department. In April, he lectured on American contemporary architecture and the rise of humanism at Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Arnold Krupat (LITERATURE) reviewed David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual in the winter edition of American Indian Quarterly. In April, he published All that Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression (University of Nebraska) and wrote the introduction to Ralph Salisbury’s Light from a Bullet Hole: New and Selected Poems, 1950-2008 (Silverfish Review).

The Pie Dialogues, a play by Joseph Lauinger (LITERATURE), premiered in Houston in February.

James Marshall (COMPUTER SCIENCE) gave a talk, “Moving Beyond CS1 with Myro and the E-puck Robot,” at the Symposium on the Future of Robots in Education in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in March.

Nicolaus Mills (LITERATURE) co-edited Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq, which was published in August (University of Pennsylvania).

In March, Brian Morton (WRITING) gave a talk on “The Inmost Leaf: Subjectivity and the Novel” at the William Alanson White Psychoanalytic Society.

Jamee Moudud (ECONOMICS) published “The Search for a New Developmental State” and “The Role of the State and Harrod’s Economic Dynamics: Toward a New Policy Agenda?” in the International Journal of Political Economy. In February, he presented papers at three panels that he co-organized for the Eastern Economic Association’s annual meeting.

Andanza, a new book of poetry by Maria Negroni (SPANISH), was published in March (Pre-Textos, Spain). Her forthcoming collection of essays, Galería Fantástica (“Fantastic Gallery”), won first prize for nonfiction writing from Siglo XXI Editores in Mexico. (Read In Person for more on Negroni's work.)

Dennis Nurkse (WRITING) received a 2009 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work appeared in magazines including The New Yorker and The Paris Review. In March, he was invited to speak at the Philip Larkin Centre at the University of Hull, England.

In February, Gilberto Perez (FILM HISTORY) published “Time and Tarkovsky” in the London Review of Books. He contributed “Errol Morris’s Irony” to the anthology Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross Mcelwee, Jean Rouch, published in March (State University of New York).

Kevin Pilkington (WRITING) published “Homesick, Strong Coffee, Extra Income” in the New York Quarterly this summer. He also contributed “Camden, The Annual Cavendish Firehouse Dance” to the Vermont Literary Review.

“Global Climate Policy and Climate Justice: a Feminist Social Provisioning Approach,” an article by Marilyn Power (ECONOMICS), appeared in the journal Challenge in January.

In February, Judith Rodenbeck (ART HISTORY) presented a paper on tropes of movement through Venice in post-war art at the Whitsworth Art Gallery in Manchester, England. She completed her term as editor-in-chief of Art Journal, and in March, she published an article about artist Corin Hewitt, “Studio Visit,” in Modern Painters.

Mark Shulman (HISTORY) published “National Security Courts: Star Chamber or Specialized Justice?” in the ILSA Journal of International and Comparative Law. His article “The ‘Global War on Terror’ Is Over, Now What? Using Law to Rebalance National Security” appeared in the Journal of National Security Law & Policy.

Fredric Smoler ’75 (LITERATURE) published two articles in April: “GIs Did Shoot Back in WWII” in VFW Magazine and an article for Forbes.com on radical economic ideas during the Great Depression. He contributed to the anthology Getting Out: Comparative Perspectives for Leaving Iraq, co-edited by Nicolaus Mills.

Robin Starbuck (VISUAL ARTS) had an art exhibit in the spring, “Cowboys and Painted Sticks,” at the SoHo20Gallery in New York.

Frederick Strype (VISUAL ARTS) won a screenwriting award at the 2008 Nantucket Film Festival and was invited to the Nantucket Screenwriters Colony, a month-long residency on the island. His film Got Next was screened at the Baton Rouge Jewish Film Festival, the Jewish Eye/World Film Festival in Israel, and the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, where it won second place for Best Short Film.

In April, Kathy Westwater MFA ’01 (DANCE) presented excerpts of a new work, “Park,” at Movement Research at the Judson Church in New York; she was awarded a studio space residency and commission at the Dance Theatre Workshop in support of the work.

Sara Wilford (ART OF TEACHING, PSYCHOLOGY) received a 2009 Champions for Children Leader of the Year Award in May, from the New York State Association for the Education of Young Children.

In June, Fiona Wilson (LITERATURE) was a resident fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland. She published “Scottish Women’s Poetry since the 1970s” in the Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Poetry (Edinburgh University).

Charles Zerner (ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES) gave a talk, “Stealth Nature: Biomesis and the Weaponization of Life,” at the Wilson Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia. He also presented “Surveillance and the Weaponization of Life” at the Law and Security Colloquium at the New York University.

Well Versed

Matthea Harvey (writing) recently won one of the world’s largest monetary prizes for poetry. “It’s funny how prizes don’t really change anything in a way,” she says. “You feel really excited, but it doesn’t change how difficult it is to write the next poem.”

Harvey received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an honor accompanied by $100,000, for her latest collection, Modern Life.

The book is her third. Harvey says she doesn’t know why it got more attention than the others, though she recognizes that her writing has evolved. “I think that when I first started writing, I wouldn’t have let myself write about robots.” (A fable about a lonely robot-boy plays a key role in the collection.) “I find robots intrinsically poetic. You can project anything onto a robot.”

Harvey, who received tenure in the spring, maintains that although balancing teaching and writing can be tricky, “When you really want a poem, even if you have lots of teaching work to do, you’ll still write the poem.”

The prize money allowed her to take this semester off to focus on finishing a few projects. Harvey smiles when asked what she’s going to do with the rest of the prize. “I’m looking into building a tree house. I have this idea that I’m going to make a little two-room tree house where I will go and write sometimes outside the city.”

Perhaps the award will change some things after all.

by Sophia Kelley MFA ’10