Associate Professor of English Christopher Bakken and Assistant Professor of Political Science Melissa Comber are the recipients of 2007-2008 Fulbright Awards. Comber received a Junior Lecturing Award to the Universitat Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany for the 2007-2008 academic year. She will teach classes in the university's North American studies department related to American government, American social welfare policies, women and politics in America, and American social policies. Bakken, whose book of poetry Goat Funeral recently received the Texas Institute of Letters Helen C. Smith Memorial Prize for the Best Book of Poetry in 2006, was awarded a Fulbright to teach and do research in Romania during the spring semester of 2008. He will divide his teaching assignment between Romanian University and the University of Bucharest.
Nathan Clendenin '07 and Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Carla Bluhm have had their manuscript “Le Stade du Dinoire: Grazed a-natomy and Surgical Hysteria” accepted for publication by the online journal of cultural studies SubjectMatters. The article, which offers a Lacanian reading of facial transplantation, is tentatively scheduled for publication in fall 2007.
Rebecca Egg '09 has been selected to participate in the Summer Mathematics Program for Women Undergraduates at Carleton College in summer 2007. This highly selective NSF-funded program is an intensive four-week experience designed to encourage and support talented undergraduate women in their study of mathematics, provide them with the tools they need to succeed in a mathematical career, and connect them with a network of female mathematicians.
Tara Fortier '08, an environmental studies major currently studying in Israel, has been awarded a Udall scholarship for 2007. This is the second year in a row that an Allegheny student has been awarded a Udall scholarship. The Udall Foundation annually awards 80 scholarships of up to $5,000 to outstanding students who are either committed to an environmental career or to Native American or Alaska Native students who are seeking careers related to tribal policy or health care. Justine Law '08, who is majoring in environmental science, was selected as a 2007 Honorable Mention.
Computer science major Joshua Geiger '08 was the winner of this year's Harold State Research Fellowship, awarded annually to third-year students majoring in any one of the natural science departments. Geiger's research project, “Avoiding Database Restarts to Reduce Regression Testing Costs,” will be undertaken during the summer of 2007 and the following academic year.
Instructor Gregory M. Kapfhammer successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on April 19 at the University of Pittsburgh to an audience consisting of his thesis committee, more than a dozen students and faculty from the Allegheny College Department of Computer Science, and guests from the University of Pittsburgh community. Kapfhammer's dissertation, “A Comprehensive Framework for Testing Database-Centric Software Applications,” was supervised by Mary Lou Soffa, University of Virginia. The technical contributions of Kapfhammer's dissertation include database interaction fault models, test adequacy criteria, test coverage monitoring techniques, and regression testing algorithms. More details are available at: http://cs.allegheny.edu/~gkapfham/research/diatoms/.
Professor of Religious Studies Carl Olson's essay “The Human Body as a Boundary Symbol: A Comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Dogen” has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming book titled Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism, edited by Gereon Kopf and published by Lexington Press. His essay “Ontology, Altarity, and Difference: A Comparison of Eliade's Method and the Postmodern Philosophy of Deleuze” has been published by Studia Philosophia of Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca (2006): 53-62. This journal is published in Romania. A third essay, “The Concept of Power in the Works of Eliade and van der Leeuw,” has been accepted for publication, along with an interview of Olson on the subject of Mircea Eliade. They will appear in a yet-untitled collection of essays and interviews being edited by Gabriel Stanescu in Romania. Olson's essay and interview will be translated into Romanian. Olson also did outside evaluations of two departments at SUNY, Old Westbury in April.
Robert Raczka, professor of art and gallery director, recently presented “Road Trips,” a one-person exhibit of collages of advertisements addressing how SUVs are marketed, at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana. He also presented “American Brain,” a large one-person exhibit of color photographs depicting symbols and representations found in public space, at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. In conjunction with this exhibit, he presented lectures about his work at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Andrew Thall has been accepted as a participant in the NSF-sponsored Media Computation Workshop to be held at Georgia Tech on June 11-13. Thall will share some of the work he has done in the area of multimedia approaches to introductory computer science, including numerical and scientific computing in interactive simulation, real-time image and music creation, and computational probability and statistics in game creation and analysis.
The Department of History has announced this year's recipients of funding from the Jonathan E. and Nancy L. Helmreich Research and Book Grant Fund.
Assistant Professor Kalé Haywood will utilize funding from the Helmreich Grant to extend research begun in her dissertation, “A Climate of Confrontation: The Cathedral Chapter in the Diocese of Michoacán, 1770-1795,” to include the dozen years before Napoleon invaded the Iberian Peninsula. She will be working in the Archivo Casa de Morelos in Morelia, Michoacán, looking at the official correspondence between the bishop, cathedral chapter, and royal authorities, to better understand the destruction of the Spanish colonial system there.
Professor Barry Shapiro will use funds from the Helmreich Grant to facilitate final revisions of his manuscript Living the Revolution: Trauma and Denial in the French Constituent Assembly, 1789-1790. He will travel to the Newberry Library in Chicago to consult some of the revolutionary pamphlets housed there.
Helmreich research funds will permit Assistant Professor Guo Wu to travel to the East Asian Library at the University of Pittsburgh. There he will work with their Chinese language sources to revise his paper “Rethinking the Critique of Chinese National Character.” This paper was presented at the American Historical Association annual conference in Atlanta in January and will be submitted to the Chinese Historical Review for publication.
The Department of History has also announced this year's recipient of funding from the Bruce Harrison '45 History Department Fund. Associate Professor Kenneth M. Pinnow will utilize the fund to travel to Moscow this summer to continue his research on the early Soviet approach to criminality. There he will explore the Laboratories for the Study of Crime and the Criminal Personality, which the Soviets created in the early 1920s. Pinnow hopes to answer questions about the sources of Soviet criminology, the treatment of the criminal, and the relationship between scientific research and state policy in the Soviet Union during the 1920s.
People & Places, published monthly during the academic year by the Office of Public Affairs, reports on the professional activities of members of the College community and highlights student achievements. Please submit items to people@allegheny.edu. Although this is the last issue of People & Places for this academic year, we are accepting submissions for September. We reserve the right to edit copy for length.
