Faculty/Staff news Summer 2014

Suzette Astley (psychology) presented a paper titled “Providing Outcomes on All Trials Reduces the Feature Positive Effect and the Long + Effect” at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Toronto. The paper was coauthored by Cornell student Tammy Aird ’14 and Mark Bouton of the University of Vermont.

Registrar Becki Elkins was named Diamond Honoree by the American College Personnel Association, College Student Educators International. The Diamond Honoree Program recognizes extraordinary contributions to the field of student affairs. In addition, Elkins, along with Ken Morris (former director of intercultural life, now manager of student equity for the Cedar Rapids Community School District) and Gwen Schimek (student affairs), had an article titled “Making Meaning through Multicultural Initiatives” published in the December edition of New Directions for Student Services.

John Gruber-Miller (classics) was elected to the Education Committee of the American Philological Association for a four-year term.

Hans Hassell (politics) published the article “Public and Partisan Opinions of the Speaker of the House” in the journal Congress & the Presidency. The findings of the piece were covered by the Washington Post in an article about the troubles that Speaker John Boehner has had with his own Republican caucus, and on Iowa Public Radio’s “River to River.” Hassell also presented a co-authored piece with Kelly Oeltjenbruns ’15 titled “When to Attack: The Dynamics of Congressional Campaign Negativity” at the Southern Political Science Association Conference in New Orleans.

Jill Heinrich (education) will have an article, “Searching for a Masculine Model: Missteps made during three Decades of the Men’s Movement & Why Moderation is the Key,” appearing in the fall 2014 edition of the Journal of Men’s Studies. The article examines contemporary male ethicists’ search for a revised masculine ethic and surveys three primary stages of the Men’s Movement: the Feminist-Friendly, Mythopoetic, and Moderate. It advances the argument that these first two movements failed because of the ideological and political gulfs they created, whereas the third, by chartering a course of moderation, holds considerable potential for success by offering men what its predecessors could not—a more suitable and appealing way of being male in the world today.

Charley Liberko (chemistry) and Theint Aung ’14 had an article published in the Journal of Chemical Education. The article, “Bringing Photochemistry to the Masses: A Simple, Effective, and Inexpensive Photoreactor, Right Out of the Box,” stems from a summer research project exploring photochemistry in organic co-crystals.

M. Philip Lucas (history) published an article, “Martin Van Buren as Party Leader,” in “The Antebellum Presidents, 1837-1861” (Wiley Blackwell, 2014).

Christina Penn-Goetsch (art history) was study leader for her second tour for the Smithsonian Institution this spring. She taught her class in Sicily and Southern Italy.

Johanna Schuster-Craig (German) has accepted a Fulbright-German Academic Exchange Service Summer Fellowship for participation in the Summer Academy for American Faculty in German in Leipzig. The two-week seminar will focus on learning new pedagogical approaches for German as a Foreign Language and networking with German and American faculty. It targets faculty teaching at small colleges.

Cindy Strong (chemistry), along with Marty St. Clair of Coe College, received a grant from the Pittsburgh Conference Memorial National College Grant fund for the purchase of a handheld X-ray fluorescence spectrometer. The instrument can measure the concentrations of metals in a wide variety of samples without destroying the sample.

Craig Teague (chemistry) will spend the summer doing research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee as part of the Visiting Faculty Program. This competitive program, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, will allow Teague and two Cornell College students the chance to do collaborative research with an established research group. One goal of the work will be to investigate the separation of carbon dioxide from other gases, with an eye toward energy production and utilization, environmental remediation, and carbon capture.

David Yamanishi (politics) helped to conceive and initiate a two-day conference on human rights scholarship and activism. Brian Farrell and Nathan Miller of the University of Iowa Center for Human Rights, Iowa City, were the other initiators of the conference, which was hosted by the Center in March.