Faculty/Staff News Spring 2014

Tori Barnes-Brus ’97 (sociology) presented “Coding and Decoding Gender: Content Analysis and the Construction of Women” to faculty and students as part of a site visit to the ACM India: Culture, Traditions, & Globalization Program in Pune, India in October.

Sandra Dyas (art and art history) travelled to parts of Iowa last summer, working on photographing people and the cultural landscapes of the Midwest. “My Eyes are Not Shut,” a photographic body of work including two video pieces, was exhibited in January and February at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wis. The invitation to exhibit this work included a public lecture and classroom visits.

Rebecca Entel (English and creative writing) presented a paper titled “Master/Czar: Comparative Slaveries in Louisa May Alcott’s ‘M.L.’” at the Transatlantic Women II: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers Abroad conference in Florence, Italy, in June. In October her short story “Corpse Pose” was named a “Highly Commended Entry” in the 2013 Manchester Writing Competition.

Laura Farmer (writing center) gave a presentation at the Midwest Writing Center Association conference titled: “Professional Writing in the Writing Center: How Writing Centers can prepare students (and consultants!) for life after college.” Farmer’s 2006 story, “Christmas Eve” was featured on the Huffington Post website in late December as one of the “12 Weirdest Stories of Christmas” along with stories by Dostoyevski, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

John Gruber-Miller’s (classics) article, “Engaging Multiple Literacies through Remix Practices: Vergil Recomposed,” was published in Teaching Classical Languages. The article examines how students in an advanced Latin course, “The Age of Augustus,” used digital resources to transform their understanding of classical reception and to create their own remix of a scene from Vergil’s Aeneid.

Elizabeth Jach, assistant director of Institutional Research and Assessment, co-presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting held in San Francisco in April on “The Impact of Student-Faculty Interactions on Academic Motivation for Male and Female Students.”

Heidi Levine (student affairs) led the pre-conference workshop at the annual Iowa Student Personnel Association conference at St. Ambrose University on Oct. 21. Titled “Developing Leaders to Foster Inclusion & Social Change,” the workshop addressed the importance of developing intercultural competence and viewing leadership as related to values and skills rather than as positional in nature. The workshop presented models for moving from a focus on “diversity” toward one of inclusion and for looking at leadership through a social change lens.

James Martin (music) presented a paper titled “Disappearance in Late-Beethoven: the Sonata in C minor Op. 111 and the Thirty-three Variations on a Waltz by Diabelli Op. 120” at an Interdisciplinary Conference given by the Graduate Center of City University of New York. The conference was titled “Disappearance: Spatial and Temporal Horizons, an Interdisciplinary Conference.”

Johanna Schuster-Craig (German) presented a paper titled “The Problem of Adolescence for Integration” at the German Studies Association conference in Denver, Colo., in October.

Ross Sowell (computer science) co-authored a journal paper, “Statistical analysis of manual segmentations of structures in medical images,” that was published in the September issue of Computer Vision and Image Understanding.

Kirilka Stavreva (English and creative writing) presented “‘We are such stuff’: Re-Mythologizing the Absolute Queen in Julie Taymor’s Tempest (2010)” at the “Shakespeare and Myth” biennial conference of the European Shakespeare Research Association in Montpellier, France, in June. Her article, “Un-Painting the Veneto Villa: Domestic Virtù and the Limits of Civic Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice” appeared in “Peregrinations of the Text: Reading, Translation, Rewriting,” edited by Evgenia Pancheva, Christo Stamenov, Maria Pipeva and Georgi Niagolov” (Sofia, Bulgaria: Sofia University Press, 2013). Stavreva’s monograph, “Words Like Daggers: Violent Female Speech and Gender in Early Modern England,” will be published next fall by the University of Nebraska Press.

In June Craig Tepper (biology) presented a research talk titled “Concerted Evolution of rDNA Genes in the Millepores” at the 15th Symposium on the Natural History of the Bahamas in San Salvador, Bahamas.

Robert Thayer (music, 1958-72) retired in July 2012 after a career of more than 50 years in music teaching and administration. Following service as music executive at the State University of New York at Potsdam and Bowling Green State University’ during the past decade Thayer has filled post-retirement engagements as interim music administrator at DePauw University, the University of Connecticut, Lawrence University, and Florida Gulf Coast University. He has been awarded honorary membership in the National Association of Schools of Music, recognizing him as an “individual of high professional qualification.”

Rebecca Wines (French) was invited to give the keynote address at the student-faculty conference “Sports, Leisure, Nationalism” organized at the College of William and Mary in April. Her paper, “Henri Desgrange, Cycling, and the Shape of the French National Body,” focused on connections among gender, class, cycling, and anxiety about national degeneration in France at the end of the 19th century. Wines presented a talk titled “Of Derby Girls and Women: Gender Concerns in ‘Whip It’” as part of the Fourth International Conference on Sport and Society hosted by Common Ground Publishing in Chicago in June.