Faculty Accomplishments

Associate Professor of Psychology Erin Sheets and Nathan Huebschmann ’19 have coauthored a new study, "Don’t Fear Conflict: Relationship Stress Beliefs in Friend, Familial, and Romantic Relationships," published in Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research. "Believing that stress can have positive effects (i.e., having a stressis-enhancing mindset) has been shown to mitigate the negative impact of stressful experiences on mental health," stated the paper's abstract. "Relationship strain seems to particularly affect the well-being of those who believe that conflict is debilitating rather than believing that conflict can be productive."

Visiting Assistant Professor in History Danae Jacobson has been selected as a New-York Historical Society Public Fellow in Religion and the American West. With the two-year fellowship, Jacobson, whose research focuses on the racial, gendered, and environmental implications of Catholic nuns’ missions in the U.S. West, will study these nuns' participation in settler colonialism. Her scholarship will contribute to the New-York Historical Society's public history project "Acts of Faith: Religion and the American West," which will be exhibited in fall 2022 in New York.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been appointed to the Strategic Communications Editorial Board of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). In her role, Robinson will work alongside the other board members to provide advice on communication with AAG members and the broader community of geographers. The term will last for two years, with an option to serve for an additional year.  

A book written by Assistant Professor of Anthropology Britt Halvorson has been awarded Honorable Mention/Second Runner-Up for the 2020 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. The Geertz Prize "seeks to encourage excellence in the anthropology of religion by recognizing an outstanding recent book in the field," according to a Twitter post by the society.   Halvorson's book, Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota (2018, University of Chicago Press), investigates the role of religion in the globalization of medicine and draws on "participant observation in the American Midwest and in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, volunteer laborers, healers, evangelists, and former missionaries."   

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch has been invited to join the board of directors of the South Solon Historical Society, which main goal is “to care for and preserve the life and traditions of the Meeting House.” Built in 1842, the South Solon Meeting House is on the National Historic Register. Between 1952 and 1956, the interior of the building received floor-to-ceiling contemporary frescoes. The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture organized three national juried competitions to select the artists (the faculty and jurors involved were René d’Harnoncourt, Director, Museum of Modern Art; John I.H. Bauer Director, Whitney Museum of American Art; Ely Jacques Kahn and Nathaniel Saltonstall, architects; and artists Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Franklin Watkins, and Isabel Bishop). The artists include Sigmund Abeles, Alfred Blaustein, Edwin Brooks, Ashley Bryan, Willard Cummings, Sidney Hurwitz, William King, Tom Mikkelson, Anne Poor, Henry Varnum Poor, Judith Shuman, Sidney Simon, and John Wallace.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has coauthored a new paper titled "Human Adaptation to Coastal Hazards in Greater Bridgetown, Barbados." Published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science, the paper highlights Greater Bridgetown’s capacity for coastal/urban resilience, but emphasizes that this cannot be maximized without institutional prioritization of vulnerability, increased stakeholder “buy-in” and participation, and significant investment in the protection of valuable coastal infrastructure. Cindy Nguyen '20, Catherine Nisbet '20, and Rock Tonkel III '20 are coauthors.

Assistant Professor of Geology Bess Koffman has contributed to a study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters. The article assessed the causes of the recent melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet. "Satellite measurements and computer models have shown that the reflectivity (or albedo) of the Greenland Ice Sheet has decreased in recent decades, causing increased melt and sea level rise," stated the paper's abstract, which also noted that the causes for the albedo decline are unknown. "We demonstrate how a recent increase in the frequency of atmospheric high-pressure systems over Greenland increases grain sizes via several mechanisms and contributes to Greenland's observed albedo decline and faster melt."

Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, is one of four invited contributors to the Library Company of Philadelphia’s innovative project, Imperfect History: Digital Catalog. An integral online element of the online exhibition Imperfect History, the catalog creatively engages with the project's concept of (un)conscious bias and multiple viewpoints in reading images. Four guest catalogers from the curatorial, art history, and studio art fields authored descriptions of the same visual material from their individual perspectives as influenced by their discipline. The objects selected for their analysis include an antebellum daguerreotype of an unidentified African-American woman, a mid-19th century allegorical print of the stages of life of a white man, and a circa 1880 watercolor of an 1851 Philadelphia street scene. The catalog serves as a case study of the inherent tensions and revelations invoked from a traditionally standardized, "objective" process pro-actively made subjective and diverse. In her own contributions, Professor Sheehan drew upon her expertise in 19th-century American visual culture, especially the history of photography and the representation of whiteness and blackness. In 2006 she held the William H. Helfand Visiting Research Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has coauthored a new paper titled "China's climate ambition: Revisiting its First Nationally Determined Contribution and centering a just transition to clean energy." Published in the journal Energy Policy, the paper argues that, while China is set to meet its non-fossil fuel targets, progress on its fossil fuel targets is stymied by continual coal development, which has negative implications for staying within the Paris Agreement's 2°C temperature limit. It further argues that the country’s focus on carbon-intensive economic expansion is a major barrier to greater climate ambition, especially in view of its growing portfolio of overseas investments in fossil fuel-dependent sectors. D'Arcy Carlson '21 led the paper. Catie Blair '21 and Mara McDonough '20 are also coauthors.

Professor of English Debra Spark has written a review of Lauren Oyler's debut novel Fake Accounts for Yale Alumni Magazine. "Oyler is a terrific writer, her long propulsive sentences featuring one mordant comment after another, so that even a reader wholly uninterested in social media will enjoy the obsessive analysis of online behavior and contemporary culture," Spark wrote.