Kudos: Fall 2016

Jin econ

Awards and Grants

Neil Weissman, interim president, and Shalom Staub, associate provost for academic affairs, were awarded $650,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the college’s Civic Learning and Engagement Initiative. The grant will launch a four-year initiative to significantly enhance civic learning and engagement in the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Specifically, the grant will provide project and seed funding for a new faculty position in practical ethics and incentives for faculty to infuse civic learning and engagement more broadly throughout the college’s curriculum. The latter will involve departmental study groups to help define specific civic learning goals and community engagement opportunities, interdisciplinary faculty seminars focusing on critical social issues, creation of a college community learning network and faculty development workshops on inclusivity. Participating faculty members will have the opportunity to apply for internal grants or reassigned time for related curriculum development and scholarly projects.

Dengjian Jin, professor of international business & management, John J. Curley ’60 and Ann Conser Curley ’63 Faculty Chair in International Studies, Business & Management, was one of just two recipients of the 2016 Schumpeter Prize, awarded biennially by the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society to scholars who contribute to the study of evolutionary economics, which includes the studies of economic change, innovation, innovation policy and natural innovation systems. Jin is the first liberal-arts professor to earn the prize. He was recognized for his 2016 book The Great Knowledge Transcendence: The Rise of Western Science and Technology Reframed, in which he traces the history of knowledge and of knowledge evolution from prehistory to the modern era.

Associate Professor of Earth Sciences Peter Sak and Assistant Professor of Earth Sciences Jorden Hayes received $7,922 from the National Science Foundation, in a supplement to an existing grant, for their research project “Using Seismic Refraction to Image the Deep Critical Zone, Basse-Terre Island, Guadeloupe.”

The Social Science Research Council-Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship Program awarded $30,000 to Assistant Professor of History Evan Young for his project “Family Matters: Managing Illness in Late Tokugawa Japan.”

Antonio Rivas, visiting assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese, has been selected for participation in the research project MIRED: Digital Challenges for Contemporary Literary Microfiction, a Genre’s Consolidation from Print to Web. The project was awarded 25,000 euros as part of the National Programme for Research Aimed at the Challenges of Society, managed by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Rivas also published by invitation, “El espectáculo inefable: el circo visto por Ramón Gómez de la Serna” in Intermedios, a catalogue accompanying the exhibit “La cultura escénica en el primer tercio del siglo XX español” at the Centro Cultural Conde Duque de Olivares (Madrid, 2016).

Assistant Professor of Economics John Cogliano received $2,700 from the National Endowment for the Humanities-Summer Seminars for College and University Teachers to participate in the institute The History of Political Economy. The three-week program was held at Duke University’s Center for the History of Political Economy.

Publications

Lorelei Koss, professor of mathematics, published “Elliptic Functions with Disconnected Julia Sets” in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, Vol. 26, No. 6 (2016). Koss writes, “In this paper we investigate elliptic functions of the form fΛ = 1/(1 + (℘Λ)2), where ℘Λ is the Weierstrass elliptic function on a real rhombic lattice. We show that a typical function in this family has a superattracting fixed point at the origin and five other equivalence classes of critical points. We investigate conditions on the lattice which guarantee that fΛ has a double toral band, and we show that this family contains the first known examples of elliptic functions for which the Julia set is disconnected but not Cantor.”

Professor of Physics Hans Pfister, Sun Woo Kim ’13 and Tyler Ralston ’15 published “A novel gridded solar air heater and an investigation of its conversion efficiency” in Solar Energy (vol. 136) in which they describe their design for a highly efficient solar air heater (SAH) that could be inexpensively and easily constructed and would pay for itself, through energy savings, within about one year of use. They outline a streamlined SAH design, in which air is pushed through the solar air heater via a small fan. The air, while passing through six specially corrugated layers of sunlight-absorbing grids, is heated as it interacts with the hot absorber surface. This SAH can be used to heat a room or small building; several SAHs can be configured as a carbon-footprint-reducing, supplemental system to heat a whole house. It also can be used to efficiently dry and preserve food. Read more at dson.co/ pfistersolarenergy.

Professor of Spanish Alberto Rodríguez and Professor José Angel Ascunce (Universidad de Deusto) co-edited the book Nómina cervantina. Siglo XX, published in Germany by Edition Reichenberger. In this book Rodríguez has published the following essay: “Rara invención. Aspectos formalistas y existencialistas en ‘Cervantes y la libertad’ de Luis Rosales.”

Jorge R. Sagastume, associate professor of Spanish, recently published “Helmut Hatzfeld y Leo Spitzer: sobre la tradición de la crítica cervantina en lengua alemana” in Nómina cervantina. Siglo XX. Ed. José Ángel Ascunce y Alberto Rodríguez, professor of Spanish. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger (2016). Sagastume also published three short stories that appeared in two different journals: “Eine neue Ära,” “Blutiges Zwielicht,” “Liebesspiele in den Tagen der Grossen Ordnung,” Ostragehege: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Kunst, Trans. U. Rachowski und M. Ritterson, Dresden: Hille, 81 (2016) and “Egal, was du sagst, du könntest verschwinden,” PEN-Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland, Trans. U. Rachowski und M. Ritterson, PEN International, Berlin (2016).

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Published October 18, 2016