Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Arisa White had her poem "My Beautiful People" published on the site Hoctok. The first stanza reads: we’ve seen this before, we’ve felt this before we’re standing on shoulders and someone’s standing on yours and crying heals and clears your vision, attunes the eyes on the back of your head, forges your insight with salt this is the beauty of being awake in your body your water whets the truth in yourself

Amber Hickey, faculty fellow in American studies, conducted an interview with the photographer Mikael Owunna for the magazine Aperture. Hickey and her co-interviewer Anney Traymany "spoke to Owunna about the gravity of this series, and how it might be mobilized as a speculative tool of creative resistance. Although most of this conversation was conducted prior to the murder of George Floyd, the video that circulated of Floyd’s death, repeatedly reposted, adds new weight to the question that drives Owunna’s photography: what is that space we can imagine beyond the limits of white supremacy, racism, and violence?"

Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor Department of Anthropology, was a guest on the podcast None of the Above in an episode titled "Airstrikes in East Africa." In the episode, Besteman and Nairobi-based journalist Amanda Sperber "unpack why the United States is waging an unofficial drone war in Somalia and explore the history and human costs of this conflict. They discuss the evolution of Al-Shabaab (an affiliate of Al-Qaeda), civilian casualties from U.S. airstrikes, and how Somalia exemplifies what many consider to be the strategic and moral failings of America’s global war on terror," according to the episode's landing page.

Professor of Latin American Studies Ben Fallaw has coedited a new book: State Formation in the Liberal Era: Capitalisms and Claims of Citizenship in Mexico and Peru (The University of Arizona Press, 2020). The book "offers a nuanced exploration of the uneven nature of nation making and economic development in Peru and Mexico. Zeroing in on the period from 1850 to 1950, the book compares and contrasts the radically different paths of development pursued by these two countries," the publisher reports.

In a new concept paper published in the journal Challenges, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson and her coauthors present a pre-analysis plan to undertake regional-level action research in the Pacific. The research will aim to help regional organizations work together to jointly access international financing for designing and implementing more effective climate change adaptation projects across the many small islands in the region.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, wrote an opinion piece picked up by Religion News Service titled "Kneeling to venerate hate: The meaning of a police killing in Minnesota." In the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Gilkes wrote, "America needs to understand that when we see a white police officer kneeling on a black body, squeezing the breath of life out of that body, we are witnessing an act of worship. It is an act of worship that honors the demons of racist hate and murder — a form of veneration deeply rooted in the American nightmare that is the underside of the American dream."  This piece also appeared in the Christian Century, Urban Christian News, and Black Christian News.

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was a guest on Shmuel "Rosner’s Torah Talk" on the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Isaacs discussed Shavuot and "the connection between harvest and Torah, the burden of Torah, the Jewish religion and Jewish People, and growing potatoes and cucumbers," the website reports.

Associate Professor of Sociology Damon W. Mayrl coauthored a study, "What Do Historical Sociologists Do All Day? Analytic Architectures in Historical Sociology," recently published in one of the top journals for sociology, American Journal of Sociology. Mayrl and Assistant Professor Nicholas Hoover Wilson of Stony Brook University used quantitative and qualitative techniques to analyze 37 award-winning publications in historical sociology between 1995 and 2015. "We show that historical sociology comprises no fewer than four distinct analytic architectures that rely on different kinds of sources and use evidence and theory in different ways," according to the paper's abstract. "We find suggestive evidence that the recognition of these different architectures has varied over time, such that award-winning works of historical sociology increasingly use architectures that favor the heavier use of primary sources and/or constructive theoretical syntheses. These findings suggest that analytic architectures are a consequential facet of the practice of social research that may yield important insights into dynamics of scholarly recognition, consecration, and methodological pluralism across the social sciences."

Assistant Professor of Biology Suegene Noh coauthored a paper recently published in the journal PeerJ titled "Endosymbiotic adaptations in three new bacterial species associated with Dictyostelium discoideum: Paraburkholderia agricolaris sp. nov., Paraburkholderia hayleyella sp. nov., and Paraburkholderia bonniea sp. Nov.” Noh and her colleagues had discovered over the years that there are three species of bacteria in the genus Burkholderia that are found in close association with the amoeba (and biomedical model organism) Dictyostelium discoideum. In this paper, we describe the morphological and physiological characteristics of each of these species and show through genome comparisons and molecular phylogenies that they are distinct from other known Burkholderia species. Therefore, Noh said, they deserve new species status, and the researchers formally named them Burkholderia agricolaris, Burkholderia hayleyella, and Burkholderia bonniea.   

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has published a paper in the well-respected journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs): Climate Change. In reviewing 28 years of literature on climate change adaptation in small islands, Robinson finds that most island research has been published by scholars in the developed world. She calls for more island research from island scholars, and for such studies to be published in top-tier, high impact-factor journals as a way of legitimizing "island studies." This, she argues, would help legitimize islands as early indicators of common global challenges.