Faculty Accomplishments

Associate Professor of Economics Daniel LaFave was the lead author of the paper "Impacts of improved biomass cookstoves on child and adult health: Experimental evidence from rural Ethiopia," published in volume 140 of the journal World Development. The paper reports on the three-year impact of the introduction of the Mirt stove on households in rural Ethiopia. Their project found that a "treatment status is associated with a precisely estimated 0.3–0.4 standard deviation improvement in height-for-age of young children exposed to the stoves during their first years of life—a substantial effect with implications for greater health and well-being throughout the life course."

On Jan. 25, 2021, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch delivered a lecture, “The Jesup Memorial Library’s Roundels in Context," at a virtual evening organized by the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, Maine, on “Medallion Mystery Talk." Her presentation discussed the bronze medallions depicting early printers' devices that grace the library's façade and considered them within the context of library architecture and of the Gilded Age elite's interest in book collecting. A publication is planned.

Assistant Professor of Art Marta Ameri was awarded a prestigious fellowship at the Rare Book School. The M. C. Lang Fellowship in Book History, Bibliography, and Humanities Teaching with Historical Sources will allow Ameri, who teaches courses on Islamic art, to augment her teaching of the art of the book in the Islamic world. The fellowship is "a two-year program designed to animate humanities teaching and equip educators to enlarge their students’ historical sensibilities through bibliographically informed instruction with original historical sources," according to the Rare Book School's website.

Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, has contributed an essay to the book The Colors of Photography (De Gruyter, 2020), edited by University of Zurich professor Bettina Gockel. Sheehan’s essay, “Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race,” examines the assumptions about and expressions of racialized power that she argues are built into the material and technological foundations of photography. Since the 19th century, photographers around the world have imagined nonwhite bodies as posing technical difficulties, particularly when it comes to lighting. Sheehan demonstrates the persistence of this idea, with recent examples from popular culture, while turning to international contemporary art to critique the sociopolitical roots of photography’s race problem. Several essays in The Colors of Photography, including Sheehan’s, originated as invited papers at an international conference in Zurich, Switzerland, organized by Gockel in October 2015.

The first interview with Associate Professor of Art Gary Green by Brad Feuerhelm from the Nearest Truth is now online. Feuerhelm, a respected photography critic whose writing and interviews are seminal to the contemporary dialogue on photography, calls Green's work "multi-layered and incredibly interesting." Feurehelm's essays, published by the Nearest Truth, Ordinary Light (Instagram), and American Suburb X (ASX), are read by tens of thousands of people around the world. The second interview, addressing Green's ongoing work has been recorded and will be online soon.

An essay by Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, appeared in Artforum, an international magazine focusing on contemporary art. The article, "Profiteer Motive," looks at an international militarization system that is the subject of Besteman's newest book, Militarized Global Apartheid. "Militarism—the ongoing investment of massive sums in technology and personnel ready to perpetrate violence—is the support structure for capitalism, facilitating the relentless search for profit through dispossession, labor exploitation, and resource extraction," she writes.

Associate Professor of French Audrey Brunetaux was nominated and elected to the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. Brunetaux's research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, culture, and cinema with an emphasis on Holocaust narratives, including that of Holocaust writer and survivor Charlotte Delbo, and films.

Luis Millones, the Allen Family Professor of Latin American Literature, has been named the associate editor of Colonial Latin American Review (CLAR), the leading academic journal in his field. Prior to this role, he was the book review editor of CLAR. Millones's research interests include pre-Columbian and colonial studies with an emphasis on the Andes, early modern science and natural histories of the New World, and Jesuits writings from a transatlantic perspective.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Derek Huffman has coauthored a new paper, which will appear in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. "In our paper, we review recent research that has studied how body-based cues contribute to how we learn and remember the locations of landmarks within large-scale environments, such as cities," Huffman explained. The article also discussed limitations of the most commonly used laboratory tasks (rats in a small environment with limited behavioral demands) to study the neuroscience of navigation, furthering the understanding of spatial memory in humans and non-human animals. "Specifically, we argue that we should develop behavioral tasks and measures of the brain that allow us to study navigation under more naturalistic conditions."

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been invited to guest-edit a special issue of Sustainability on "Transformations for a Sustainable Future." Papers will interrogate the transformations that are relevant or applicable to small island developing states, the least developed countries (LDCs), and African countries, given their complex histories and varying development circumstances and trajectories. It is hoped that the papers will contribute to discussions at the Fifth United Nations Conference on the LDCs, which will be held in Doha in January 2022.