During the year, Scripps faculty members do much more than teach and advise. Here are just a few of their many accomplishments.
Art
Kim Trang-Tran’s 1992-2006 video series, The Complete Blindness Series, was screened at the REDCAT Theater in Los Angeles, in March 2008. This fall, she begins a three-year term as director of Scripps Humanities Institute.
Ken Gonzales-Day has been selected to be a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute for the fall 2008 semester. This spring and summer, his large photographic murals depicting the lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in California are prominent part of LACMA’s “Phantom Sightings” exhibition of Mexican American art.
Art History
Juliet Koss has been awarded the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin for the spring 2009 semester. In fall 2007 she had a Mellon New Venture Fellowship and in spring and summer 2008 she was a scholar in residence at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, researching a project on the symbolic status of architecture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s. This past year she gave lectures at the University of Virginia, New York University, Columbia University, Wesleyan University, the University of Buffalo, the Zentralinstitut für Kunst und Medien in Karlsruhe, Germany, and at the CCA in Montreal.
Classics
David Roselli received a $10,000 Graves Award to support his trip to the Black Sea region this summer to research interactions between the ancient Greeks and indigenous populations of the region. He will be a senior visiting associate member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Gender and Women’s Studies
Leigh Gilmore, the Backstrand Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, was invited to speak at the International Auto/Biography Association conference in June 2008 as someone “whose publications and contributions have profoundly influenced the course of life writing studies.” Gilmore published several articles this year, including “Looking Back/Looking Forward” in Women’s Studies Quarterly and “What Do We Teach When We Teach Trauma?” in Teaching Life Writing Texts.
History
Rita Roberts was selected to participate in the Council of Independent Colleges/Gilder Lehrman History Seminar at Yale University this June.
Languages
Roswitha Burwick published two articles in German that appeared in Movable Texts and Yearbook on the International Arnim Society. The articles trace Ludwig Achim von Arnim’s ideas from his first publication on electricity to his follow-up essays on galvanism and magnetism. In January 2008, Burwick edited two volumes containing all of Arnim’s published essays on natural sciences.
Elise Magistro of the Italian Department has translated, from Italian to English, the book Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily by Maria Messina.
Eric Haskell’s book Les Jardins de Brécy: Le Paradis Retrouvé/The Gardens of Brécy: A Lasting Landscape was published in Paris by Les Editions de Huitième Jous in both French and English editions.
Mathematics
Winston Ou’s article, “Near-Symmetry of A_\infty and Refined Jones Factorization,” appeared in the September 2008 issue of Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society; the work had previously been presented at the quadrennial Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations Conference in El Escorial, Spain in June.
In April, Chris Towse was the principal investigator on a successful NSF-REU grant in mathematics awarded to The Claremont Colleges. His article, “Generalized continued fractions and orbits under the action of Hecke triangle groups” with Elise Hanson ’08 and A. Merberg and E. Udovina, will be in an upcoming issue of Acta Arithmetica.
Music
Hao and Rachel Huang were featured concerto soloists with the Albuquerque Philharmonic Orchestra in Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Piano and string orchestra in late October. In 2008, Professor Huang performed concerts all across the world, including venues in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, France, and China, and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Eotvos Llorand University in Budapest. He also taught American music and researched Dohnanyi and Bartok, and performed the Gershwin Piano Concerto in F Major in a return engagement with the Albuquerque Philharmonic.
Cándida Jáquez reviewed Daniel H. Sheehy’s book, Mariachi Music in America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, in the fall/winter 2006 issue of Latin American Music Review.
Chuck Kamm’s annotations on the Gradual in Denison Library were published online in November 2007 as part of the Claremont Digital Library. The publication includes a digital image of each page of the manuscript along with liturgical and musicological notes. In December, his article, “The Unaccompanied Mixed-Voice Choral Music of Einojuhani Rautavaara,” was published as part of the Research Memorandum Series of the American Choral Foundation.
You Young Kang received a Mellon 23 Grant in February 2008 for her project “Building Musical Intuitions: Teaching Music Theory at a Liberal Arts College.”
Philosophy
In September 2007, Rivka Weinberg’s article “Identifying and Dissolving the Non-Identity Problem” was accepted for publication in a top-tier philosophy journal, Philosophical Studies. The following month, Weinberg’s paper “The Moral Complexity of Sperm Donation” was accepted by the journal Bioethics. A second paper of Weinberg’s, “It Ain’t My World,” a critique of consequentialist theories of moral obligation, was accepted by the journal Utilitas.
Psychology
Michael Spezio and Paul Zak’s (CGU) proposal for research investigating the neural mechanisms mediating the effect of loving-kindness meditation on generosity and trust was funded $30,000. Spezio is also the recipient of a $100,000 STARS Research Grant for his project “The Rationality of Ultimate Value: Emotion, Awareness, and Causality in Virtue Ethics and Decision Neuroscience.” STARS is a program of the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences (CTNS) in Berkeley, Calif.
Stacey Wood received a $20,000 Borchard Foundation Grant to develop a capacity assessment model and handbook for psychologists.
Religion
Emerita professor Kathleen Wicker co-edited Togbi Dawuso Dofe: Mami Water in the Ewe Tradition, documenting research on Mami Water, a water divinity in Africa.
Sciences
Biology professor Melissa Coleman published her article, “Thalamic gating of auditory responses in telencephalic song control nuclei,” in the Journal of Neuroscience in September of 2007.
Chemistry professor Mary Hatcher-Skeers will soon be publishing her article “31P NMR investigation of backbone dynamics in DNA binding sites” in the Journal of Physical Chemistry in association with Michael Kayatta (CMC ’06), Katharine Shultis ’07, Alejandro Gonzalez (CMC ’06), Ye Tran, Leonard J. Mueller, and Ye Tian.
Physics professor Adam Landsberg published his article “Nonlinear dynamics in combinatorial games: Renormalizing Chomp,” in Chaos this past year. Landsberg also published “Scaling, Renormalization, and Universality in Combinatoria Games,” in Combinatorial Optimization and Applications.
Biology professor Don McFarlane’s article “Pleistocene depositional history in a periglacial terrane: A 500ka record from Kents Cavern, Devon, United Kingdom” was published in the journal Geosphere with J. Lundberg. He also received a Mellon Cluster Grant for his project “Putting Inter-College Undergraduate Research Affiliations on the Map: A Firestone Reserve Workshop.”
John Milton, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Computational Neuroscience, published “Why did Casey strike out? The neuroscience of hitting,” with S. L. Small and A. Solodkin in the book Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the heads of players and fans, edited by D. Gordon.
Chemistry professor Kathleen Purvis-Roberts’ article “Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Mapping of Environmental Samples Across a College Campus,” was published in The Journal of Chemical Education with other Joint Science professors Harriet P. Moeur and Andrew Zanella.
David Sadava, Pritzker Family Foundation Professor of Biology in the Joint Science Department, published the 8th edition of Life: The Science of Biology, of which he is co-author. Sadava also published two articles in 2007 regarding lung-cancer cells in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.
Chemistry professor Burke Scott Williams published an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 2007, in association with Brian Madison (CMC ’06), Summer Thyme ’05, and Sarah Keene ’06. Professor Williams also received a grant totaling just under $150,000 from the National Science Foundation for his project “IONiC: A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education.”
Biology professor Emily Wiley published “A class II HDAC deacetylates newly-synthesized histones in Tetrahymena” in association with Scripps alumae SharonTorigoe ’07, Julia Maxson ’05, and Lisa Fish ’06 and “Class I histone deacetylase Thd1p promotes global chromatin condensation in Tetrahymena thermophila” in association with alumnae Maxson and Alissa Mooney ’04 in the journal Eukaryotic Cell. She also edited the book Current Protocols: Essential Laboratory Techniques with S.R. Gallagher, which included an article by Wiley and D. Chakravarti.
Wiley received funding in her NSF grant to sponsor a campus workshop that will teach participants how to integrate functional genomics research into their molecular and cell biology classroom laboratories.