Faculty Notes
HISTORY – At the North American Conference on British Studies in Washington D.C., Stephanie Barczewski chaired a panel on “Objectifying Empire: The Legacy of Objects and the Imperial Experience,” while Caroline Dunn was commentator for the panel “Medieval Law and the Margins of Society.”
ARCHITECTURE – On Nov. 10, an exhibit of selected sketches and watercolors by Jim Barker opened in the Sheffield Wood Gallery at the Fine Arts Center in Greenville, S.C. In his first show, Jim displays works completed from 2000 until the present. Jim started drawing while an architecture student and has done pen-and-ink and pencil drawings of many campus scenes as well as places he has visited around the world. Since returning to the faculty, he has done several watercolors and experimented with charcoal. The Fine Arts Center, established in 1974, provides advanced comprehensive arts instruction to students who are artistically talented and wish to take an intensive pre-professional program of study. The exhibit runs through Feb. 3, 2017 in the Sheffield Wood Gallery, 102 Pine Knoll Road in Greenville.
PERFORMING ARTS – Anthony Bernarducci had the first movement of a three-movement choral work published with GIA Publications. The piece is titled “Kyrie: Missa Brevis San Francesco d’ Assisi.”
CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT – Joseph Burgett was awarded the “2016 Regional Excellence Teaching Award” by the Southeast Regional Associated Schools of Construction for his demonstrated excellence in teaching at the undergraduate and/or graduate level.
HISTORY – Vernon Burton’s essay, “Localism and Confederate Nationalism: The Transformation of Values from Community to Nation in Edgefield, South Carolina,” pp. 107-123, 233-39 was published in Citizen Scholar: Essays in Honor of Walter Edgar, edited by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. (USC Press). Oct 27, he presented a lecture “A New Birth of Freedom” (chap. 2) from his book manuscript “Race and the Supreme Court” at the American History Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University London. On Oct. 28, at the British American Nineteenth Century History (BRanch) 23rd annual meeting at Madingley Hall, he spoke briefly about historian Charles Joyner. The next evening he gave the keynote, “Reconstructing Reconstruction” at Cambridge University. For their 75th anniversary, on Oct. 8, Burton presented a lecture, “The South as Other: The Southerner as Stranger,” to the McKissick Club in Greenwood, S.C. On Nov. 26 at the Social Science History Association annual meeting in Chicago he presented a paper “Using the Social Web to Explore Online Discourse and Southern Identity and Memory of the Civil War” in a session on “Collective Memory and Public Discourse.” The next day he chaired and served as a commentator on the presidential session “Sustaining Soil Fertility in Agricultural Systems.”
HISTORY – Elizabeth Carney presented a paper titled “The Public Image of Eurydice, mother of Philip II” at the conference on Hellenistic Queenship at the University of Waterloo.
LANGUAGES – Stephen Fitzmaurice was invited to present “High school interpreters: What are the other duties?” at the national, biennial Conference of Interpreter Trainers held in Lexington, Kentucky. This work was presented entirely in American Sign Language and is the result of a landmark ethnographic exploration uncovering the other functions an educational interpreter performs aside from the direct transfer of meaning in high school environments.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION – Frances Ford and Brent Fortenberry’s paper, “Hybrid Methodologies for Mortar Analysis, a View from the Carolina Lowcountry” was published in Proceedings of the 4th Historic Mortars Conference HMC2016, 673-680, edited by Ioanna Papayiannai, Maria Stefanidou and Vasiliki Pachta.
COLLEGE – Rick Goodstein has been elected as a member of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi, the oldest and most selective honor society for all academic disciplines in the United States. Founded in 1897, Phi Kappa Phi is a charter member of the Association of College Honor Societies.
HISTORY – Roger Grant’s 32nd book, “Electric Interurbans and the American People,” has been published by Indiana University Press. Grant gave an address on Oct. 31 to the Monday Luncheon Group in Columbia, S.C. on “Railroads and the Historian.” In early November, he represented Simpson College of Iowa at the inauguration of Scott Cochran as the new president of Spartanburg Methodist College. On Nov. 13, Grant gave an address to the Old Edgefield Genealogical Society on “The Georgia & Florida Railroad and Its Greenwood, South Carolina Extension.”
ENGLISH – Walt Hunter presented a paper at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Pasadena, California called “On Togetherness: Claudia Jones’s Poetics of Black Revolutionary Feminism.” Hunter was quoted on John Clare, poetics, and dispossession in an article in The Atlantic, “The Poems That Help With Sudden Change.” Hunter’s poem “No Trees” was published in November in the print issue of Prelude magazine.
ENGLISH – Steve Katz, Pearce Professor of Professional Communication, had “The Corpus of Poems” published in Pre/Text, a special issue on “Games and Rhetorics” edited by Jan Holmevik. The poems were: “After Reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (A Pantoum);” “The Clone Comes to Consciousness;” “Neuronic;” “Mimesis Mine;” “Pinball Goes Subatomic;” “Anyon There?;” “Virtual Gloves;” and “Avatar of Love.” Steve also participated as a full committee member in a doctoral defense at NC State University, in which Elizabeth Pitts examined the ethics of genetic engineering as a new and unregulated form of writing in DIYi/hacker labs. She passed.
ARCHITECTURE – Peter Laurence’s book, “Becoming Jane Jacobs,” has won the Urban Communication Foundation’s 2016 Jane Jacobs Book Award. Also, the book is included on economist Tyler Cowen’s year-end list of the best non-fiction books of 2016. In late November, Laurence gave a keynote lecture at KTH in Stockholm, Sweden, following presentations at the University of Virginia and Boston College.
HISTORIC PRESERVATION – Amalia Leifeste coordinated a PechaKucha presentation and mixer event to bring together students studying the built environment through various degree programs in Charleston, S.C. Presenters and attendees hailed from the American College of the Building Arts, Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston, the College of Charleston’s historic preservation and community planning program, the Art Institute of Charleston’s interior design program and Clemson + CofC’s graduate program in historic preservation.
PERFORMING ARTS – Andrew Levin’s musical composition, “Round Dance no. 13,” was selected a winner in the South Carolina State Performance Assessment Sight Reading Composition Competition. Orchestras across the state will perform the piece in late spring 2017.
LANGUAGES – A new collection, “Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: Philosophy, Morality, Tragedy,” edited by Jeff Love and Jeffrey Metzger, has just been published by Northwestern University Press.
HISTORY – In November, Steven Marks delivered a keynote lecture titled “Capitalism and the Information Nexus” at the ‘Costs of Information: Northern European Markets, 12th-18th Centuries” conference at the University of Copenhagen.
HISTORY – Michael Meng chaired a panel at the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies meeting in Washington D.C. “One for All and All for One: Mass Responses to Soviet Political and Cultural Influences, 1920s-70s” and chaired a roundtable session on “Tolstoy and the Fiction of History.”
LANGUAGES – Tiffany Creegan Miller published a book chapter entitled, “Una sociedad fragmentada: la heterogeneidad maya durante el conflicto armado guatemalteco y la violencia de la ‘posguerra’ en ‘Insensatez’” in the edited volume “Horacio Castellanos Moya: el diablo en el espejo,” published by Ediciones Eón in Mexico and edited by María del Carmen Caña Jiménez and Vinodh Venkatesh. In other news, Miller also presented work on appropriations of Japanese cultural forms in K’iche’ Maya poetry at the Symposium on Indigenous Languages and Cultures of Latin America (ILCLA) at Ohio State University. She also was invited to be a guest lecturer for a medical Spanish class at Brown University to discuss health care initiatives in Guatemalan Maya communities.
HISTORY – Maribel Morey was very active at the meeting of the Association for Non-Profit Organizations and Voluntary Actions meeting in Washington D.C, presenting papers in two sessions and also participating in a mini-plenary session.
ENGLISH – Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance received the 2016 SAMLA Studies Award for their multi-author volume “George Cukor: Hollywood Master,” published in 2015 by Edinburgh UP. The award is the first for an edited volume presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association
ENGLISH – Elizabeth Rivlin was invited by her alma mater, Vassar College, to participate in an alumni panel, as well as other events, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The panel included Shakespeare scholars and practitioners.
PERFORMING ARTS – Shannon Robert won the Atlanta Theatre Suzi Bass Award for Best Scene Design for a Musical for her design of “In The Heights” for Aurora Theatre and Theatrical Outfit.
CITY PLANNING AND REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT – Jim Spencer has been appointed by U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx to serve as a subject matter expert on the new federal Advisory Committee on Transportation Equity (ACTE). According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the committee is intended “to connect people to opportunity, strengthen and revitalize communities, and ensure that transportation systems and facilities reflect and incorporate the input of all of the people and communities they touch.” The ACTE will provide independent advice and recommendations to the Secretary of Transportation about USDOT’s efforts to: 1) institutionalize DOT’s Opportunity Principles into the Department’s programs, policies, and activities; 2) empower communities to have a meaningful voice in local and regional transportation decisions; 3) strengthen and establish partnerships with other governmental agencies regarding opportunity issues; and 4) sharpen enforcement tools to ensure compliance with opportunity-enhancing regulations. The ACTE will consist of up to 15 voting members who will serve two-year terms and meet approximately twice per year. The committee’s first public meeting will be held December 15, 2016 in Washington, D.C.
GEOGRAPHY – Billy Terry presented a paper titled “Seasonal Guest Work and Vulnerability in Hospitality and Tourism: Challenges for J-1 and H-2B Workers” at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Division of the Association of American Geographers.
ENGLISH – Rhondda Robinson Thomas (English) made three presentations on her project “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History” at EDUMAX in San Diego on Nov. 1; for the roundtable “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Public Memory and Commemoration of Racial Violence” at the Southern Historians Association Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, on Nov. 3; and “Of Slaves, Sharecroppers, and Convicts: Unsettling Clemson University’s History” at the University of Maryland for the “Democracy Then and Now Series: co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Local Americanists on Nov. 7.
LANGUAGES – Graciela Tissera presented her research on the supernatural in Hispanic films, “Spirits Trapped between Worlds: The Devil’s Backbone by Guillermo del Toro,” and chaired a panel on film and paranormal phenomena at the Film and History Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Oct. 29. Tissera’s students, Jodie Holodak and Rebecca McConnell, participated in the panel to discuss their Creative Inquiry projects related to health and business topics in film and media. Tissera also attended the Film and Literature Conference organized by the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina (Nov. 8) to present her research paper entitled “Theories of Knowledge in the Fiction of Borges and Cortázar.”
LANGUAGES – Eric Touya published a book entitled “The Case for the Humanities: Pedagogy, Polity, Interdisciplinarity.” Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. The book contends that the well-being of the humanities, as a field of study, has not only academic but also cultural, political and existential ramifications.
ART – Anderson Wrangle gave an artist’s talk at the Crutchfield Gallery of the Spartanburg County Public Library on Dec. 1 in conjunction with his exhibition “Falling Water.”
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Daniel Wueste published, “Hard Cases, Discordant Voices: Professional Ethics and ‘Ethics Plain and Simple’,” in The Annals of Thoracic Surgery, Volume 102, Issue 6, 1785.
Program Notes
CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT – Student competition teams (Commercial and Design Build) were awarded second place in the recent Southeast Regional Associated Schools of Construction Student Competitions. Thanks to Joe Burgett and Shima Clarke for all of their hard work serving as team coaches.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – The Department of Philosophy and Religion hosted a visit by Dr. Brian Butler, Distinguished Professor of Humanities at UNC-Asheville on Nov. 9. He gave a talk on a pragmatist approach to Constitutional Law as part of the Lemon Lectures in Social, Legal and Political Thought, and met with students in Andrew Garnar’s “American Pragmatism” seminar to discuss his forthcoming book. This provided the students an exciting opportunity to engage in a lively discussion with an expert in John Dewey’s philosophy of law.
ENGLISH – On Nov. 11, graduate students in Clemson’s Master of Arts in Professional Communication program hosted a World Usability Day celebration in the Class of 1941 Studio. Students from the Human Centered Computing program and several MAPC alumni were in attendance as well. The guest speaker lineup featured Mike Wolfe of Slalom Consulting, Maggie Reilly of TSYS, Cliff Anderson of Ally Bank, and Bryce Howard of U.S. Naval Air Systems Command. Presentations covered a wide range of topics within usability including entertainment platform design parameters, software development, realistic chatbot creation and scrum project management. The celebration concluded with a round table discussion of career opportunities in the field. The MAPC students would like to thank Dr. Tharon Howard for his help in planning and all our attendees who made the event a success.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – The Clemson University Ethics Bowl public policy debate team, led by coaches Stephen Satris, John Park, and Adam Gies, took third place at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Ethics Bowl competition on Nov. 19. After going undefeated three rounds in a row, the team narrowly lost in the semifinal round with Wake Forest. The Clemson team earned a spot at the National Ethics Bowl Competition in Dallas in February 2017.
