Winter 2015 Kudos
Grants
The U.S. Department of State FY14 U.S.-Russia Peer-to-Peer Dialogue Program awarded Assistant Professor of Russian Alyssa DeBlasio and Associate Professor of Russian Elena Duzs $76,573 to conduct a two-way scholar exchange between Dickinson and the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH), with the primary goal of exchanging best practices in liberal-arts teaching, both in person and virtually. The exchange will place faculty and students from Russia and the U.S. in consistent dialogue with their peers and will deepen the already established partnership between the two institutions. Learn more.
Presentations
Julie Vastine ’03, director of the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring (ALLARM), was the keynote speaker at the 10th annual MiCorps Conference of the Michigan Clean Water Corps, where she spoke on “Volunteer Monitoring: A Tool for Change.” Vastine, who has been named as the alternate volunteer monitoring representative to the National Water Quality Monitoring Council, also presented “Pennsylvania Stream Monitoring: Data Collection to Policy Action” at the Exploring Public Participation in Scientific Research Under Western Skies Conference.
Publications
Michael Fratantuono, associate professor of international studies, business and management; David Sarcone, associate professor of international business and management; and John D. Colwell, deputy director of academic engagement at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), U.S. Army War College, published The U.S.-India Relationship: Cross-Sector Collaboration to Promote Sustainable Development, a collection of reflections and transcripts from a March 2013 workshop co-hosted by Dickinson and SSI. Learn more.From Herman Melville’s claim that “failure is the true test of greatness” to Henry Adams’s self-identification with the “mortifying failure in [his] long education” and William Faulkner’s eagerness to be judged by his “splendid failure to do the impossible,” the rhetoric of failure has served as a master trope of modernist American literary expression. In False Starts: The Rhetoric of Failure and the Making of American Modernism, recently published by Northwestern University Press, Associate Professor of English David Ball addresses the fundamental questions of language, meaning and authority that run counter to claims of American innocence and positivity, beginning with the American Renaissance and extending into modernist and contemporary literature.
Professor of History Karl Qualls’ “From Niños to Soviets? Raising Spanish Refugee Children in House No. 1, 1937–1951” was published in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 48 (2014). The journal article explores the lives of roughly 3,000 children, with teachers and caregivers, after their move to the Soviet Union in the wake of 1937-38 bombings of Guernica and northern Spain. Despite the horrors of war and multiple evacuations, oral historians have shown that overwhelmingly, although not exclusively, niños’ memories of time spent in the USSR were quite positive. In Qualls’ close reading of archival sources, he shows that Soviet authorities removed “bad” influences from the children’s lives and provided a school curriculum and extra-curricular activities that modeled proper Soviet behavior and thought. Without adults around who could provide a counternarrative, Soviets were able to control the remaking of these children into Spanish-Soviet hybrids once it became clear that the children would not be returning to Spain.
Beverley Driver Eddy, professor emerita of German, published Camp Sharpe’s ‘Psycho Boys’: From Gettysburg to Germany (Merriam Press, 2014). Drawing on company histories, memoirs and interviews, Eddy traces the history of the men of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Mobile Radio Broadcasting Companies during World War II.
Lars English, associate professor of physics, recently published two articles in Physical Review E: “Synchronization in Phase-Coupled Kuramoto Oscillator Networks With Axonal Delay and Synaptic Plasticity,” with Liam Timms ’13, and “Nonlinear Localized Modes in Two-dimensional Electrical Lattices,” with F. Palmero, Joseph F. Stormes ’13, J. Cuevas, Carretero-Gonzalez and P. G. Kevrekidis. Lars also published “Experimental Results for the sine-Gordon Equation in Arrays of Coupled Torsion Pendula” in The sine-Gordon Model and Its Applications: From Pendula and Josephson Junctions to Gravity and High Energy Physics (edited by J. Cuevas, P. Kevrekidis, F. Williams; Springer Verlag, 2014).
Assistant Professor of Political Science David O’Connell’s God Wills It: Presidents and the Political Use of Religion was published by Transaction Publishers. The book is a comprehensive study of presidential religious rhetoric. Using careful analysis of hundreds of transcripts, O’Connell reveals the hidden strategy behind presidential religious speech. He asks when and why religious language is used and whether such language is influential.
In the News
Associate Professor of Music Lynn Helding co-founded and is chief operating officer of the Pan-American Vocology Association (PAVA), the first organization devoted to the scientific study of voice. PAVA offers symposia and online educational oppor-tunities for voice professionals, clinicians and researchers, applying the scientific method to better understand, teach and practice the art. Learn more.
The Forum on Education Abroad recognized a group of Dickinson and Akita International University faculty for Excellence in Education Abroad Curriculum Design for their inter-disciplinary course, Living Well in Later Life, offered as part of Dickinson’s U.S.-Japan Global Scholars Program. The course was one of 24 nominated for the award, which was announced in celebration of Inter-national Education Week. The award recognized Shawn Bender, associate professor of East Asian studies; John Henson, Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology; David Sarcone, associate professor of international business and management; Shalom Staub, associate provost for academic affairs; and Yoshitaka Kumagai, dean of international collaboration, director of the Center for Regional Sustainability Initiatives and director of the Center for East Asia Research at Akita International University. Learn more.
Read more from the winter 2015 issue of Dickinson Magazine.
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Published January 20, 2015