Faculty Accomplishments

A blog post on Savvy Verse & Wit featured the new poetic memoir Who's Your Daddy? by Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Arisa White. "White is a deft storyteller," the post says, "and readers will be emotionally spent by this poetic memoir."

Professor of Statistics Liam O’Brien has coauthored a paper, "Assessing Older Adult Wellness: An Assessment of the Psychometric Properties of the Lifestyle Survey," recently published in the Journal of Nursing Measurement. "The purpose of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of the Lifestyle Survey instrument," according to the study's abstract. The researchers concluded that "with refinement, the Lifestyle Survey is a valid and reliable measure of wellness among community-dwelling older adults."

Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, Emeritus, has coauthored a new article, Trends in stable-isotopes and climate proxies from late Changhsingian ghost landscapes of the Karoo Basin, South Africa, published in Frontiers in Science: Ecology and Evolution. "The manuscript continues reports of our studies on the paleoclimatology of the latest Permian in the Karoo Basin, about 253 million years ago," explained Gastaldo. "What we have been able to demonstrate is that over a period of several hundreds of thousands to a million or more years, climate varied in the Southern Hemisphere between intervals of wet and cool conditions and warm and seasonally dry conditions. The widely accepted model for this interval of time is one of a unidirectional increase in temperature and aridity. Our data demonstrate that this hypothesis is too simplistic, and increased cooling and wetting are characteristic of the climate on land prior to a reported ecological turnover at the end of the period."

Raffael Scheck, the Gibson Professor of History, has published a new article on the treatment of Western prisoners of war during World War II in the journal, War in History. "Nazi courts martial could sentence prisoners of war for offences that did not exist in the western democracies, such as insults to the Führer, or severely punish them for acts leading only to mild disciplinary sanctions in Britain or America," according to the paper's abstract. "These asymmetries, which influenced the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war of 1949, challenge the paradigm of reciprocity and symmetry in prisoner of war regimes between Germany and the western countries in World War II."

In a correspondence published in Nature and available here, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson and colleagues draw attention to the need for an internationally agreed-upon definition of climate finance. Without this, donors decide what counts as climate finance. This has serious implications for whether countries in the Global South can adequately mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Raffael Scheck, the Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz and Sheldon Toby Katz Professor of History, has published a paper, "The Danger of 'Moral Sabotage:' Western Prisoners of War on Trial for Homosexual Relations in Nazi Germany," in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. The article presents the Nazi approach to homosexuality and the legal framework around it. It also examines representative cases involving French, British, and Belgian prisoners of war as well as soldiers from the French and British colonies.

Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, has participated in a virtual roundtable discussion with two other editors of leading journals in the field of American art. In conversation with Jennifer Marshal and Jacqueline Francis of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, Sheehan discussed her work since 2015 as the executive editor of the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal. The oldest periodical devoted to art in America, Archives of American Art Journal has undergone a significant transformation under Sheehan’s leadership. The Nov. 19 event, focusing on the history, current goals, and future trajectories of these two prominent journals for American art, was organized by Jennifer Greenhill of the University of Arkansas School of Art in collaboration with the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art. A recording of the discussion is available here.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch was invited to participate in the workshop "Écritures exposées: la fabrique des espaces 'publics'" (Exposed Writings: The Making of "Public" Space) organized by the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). The meeting took place Nov. 27, 2020, and Plesch provided a response to a paper on 16th-18th-century graffiti left by religious prisoners and contributed to a discussion of the aims of the workshop, focusing on the concepts at stake and, in particular, issues concerning writing and space.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Britt Halvorson has published a new paper in Anthropological Quarterly. The article, “Reassessing Charitable Affect: Volunteerism, Affect and Ethical Practice in a Medical Aid Agency,” draws upon ethnographic research with the long-term US volunteers of a faith-based medical aid organization in Minneapolis/St. Paul and explores the widely-theorized relationship of affect/emotion and volunteerism in humanitarian agencies. It argues for finer attention to the way different affective norms get reproduced within the everyday work of aid.

Assistant Professor of Geology Bess Koffman has coauthored a new paper, "New Zealand as a source of mineral dust to the atmosphere and ocean," published in Quaternary Science Reviews. The study characterizes New Zealand's South Island as a source of dust to the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere. To learn more about why dust is important in the climate system, watch Koffman's video, highlighting the field sampling for this project:   [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YN1VWyuf2AM&feature=youtu.be[/embed]