Month: November 2023

ENGLISH – Professor Susanna Ashton authored a review of Tara A. Bynum’s book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press, 2023). The review was published in the November 2023 edition of History of Education Quarterly.

HISTORY – Professor Amit Bein presented a paper on “Turkey, Islam, and the Middle East in the Interwar Period” at an international conference at Columbia University in New York City.

HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton authored a foreword to Ashton Davies’ book on significant Supreme Court cases, A Movement in Words (California, 2023). As part of its Dialogue Nights collection, the Atlantic Institute presented “Alexander v. SC NAACP, part II: Amicus Briefs as ‘Voices’ part of the dialogue” with scholars including Burton. On October 10, Episode 1 of Clemson University historian Otis Pickett’s podcast series “Purpose that Prevails” on the American South featured Burton and Professor Rhondda Thomas in conversation. On October 19, Burton gave the opening remarks for the South Carolina Awards in the Humanities luncheon and awards Ceremony in Columbia. He was part of the program and had a dialogue with Cecil Williams at the Clemson University 2023 Joseph and Mattie De Laine Lecture at the Madren Center. On October 31, Burton was interviewed by reporter Kamilah Williams and appeared on a Macon, Georgia, news station on a redistricting case and the closing of polling places.

ENGLISH – Director of First Year Composition Sarah E.S. Carter published “Inviting Literacy Narratives for National Day on Writing” for the National Council of Teachers on October 18.

HISTORY – Assistant Professor Joshua Catalano participated in a roundtable discussion, “Indigenous Peoples and Land-Grant Universities in the United States,” at the American Society for Ethnohistory conference in Tallahassee, Florida, on November 3, 2023. He also published a review of Elizabeth Rule’s Guide to Indigenous DC in Reviews in Digital Humanities.

LANGUAGES – Assistant Professor of American Sign Language Jody Cripps had two articles published in October. The first article with his colleagues was “Student Experiences and Outcomes in Flipped L2/Ln American Sign Language Classrooms: A Replication Study,” and it was published in Language Learning. The second one is “The Past, the Present, and the Future for American Sign Language,” published in The Endeavor. Along with this publication, he also gave this presentation at the American Society for Deaf Children’s Literacy Conference in Charleston. He gave a presentation titled “Experiences of a Researcher-Participant in Two Signed

Music Cases: The Black Drum and the Resonance Project” at the Society of Ethnomusicology conference in Ottawa, Canada. He also put on a musical performance called “Stars and Anchors” and was one of the panelists for the signed music concert called “Play It By Eye: An Introduction to Signed Music.”

ENGLISH – Lecturer Stevie Edwards’ third poetry book, Quiet Armor, was released from Northwestern University Press’ Curbstone Imprint on October 15. Edwards has recently done promotional readings for the book, including presenting on a panel at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, as well as book release events at Deep Vellum Bookstore in Dallas, Texas, and locally at The Pendleton Bookshop in Pendleton, South Carolina.

ENGLISH – Pearce Professor of Professional Communication Jordan Frith’s newest book, Barcode, was just published as part of the Object Lessons series. The book is an engaging exploration of the cultural history of the barcode that examines how this taken-for-granted 50-year-old technology significantly shaped the global economy and became maybe the most recognizable icon of contemporary capitalism. The book covers the early history of the barcode and analyzes how the barcode somehow ended up playing a big role in sci-fi dystopias, biblical prophecies, consumer protests, labor movements and a presidential election. Frith also published an article in Slate titled, “A Complex History of Things That Never Happened,” which traces the complicated roots of a recent conspiracy theory that linked together 5G networks, the Emergency Alert System and a zombie apocalypse.

PERFORMING ARTS – Brooks Center Director Emerita Lillian Utsey Harder, artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured a broadcast on October 25, 2023, on America Public Media’s Performance Today of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 9 in A Major (arr. by Ruben Renge) performed by Sphinx Virtuosi on March 30, 2023.

ENGLISH – Associate Dean Michael LeMahieu attended the Modernist Studies Association conference in Brooklyn, New York, where he presented a paper, “Apparently Slight Things: The Civil War’s Many Names,” as part of a special session on “Naming and Memorialization.”

ENGLISH – Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, was invited to be a participant for the “The Invisible Campus Comes to Light” panel during the 4th Annual Global Women’s Conference on October 18 at Agnes Scott College. It explored the themes of visibility, social mobility and success. She presented the concept for a digital humanities project titled “Contextualizing John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation South Carolina Backcountry: Interconnected Communities of Enslaved Persons” at the Digitizing and Decolonizing Collections: The Sandbach Tinne Virtual Conference hosted by the University of Bristol and Bristol Digital Futures Institute.

ARCHITECTURE — Professor Anjali Joseph was invited to participate in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Director’s Roundtable Series in October. This series was titled, ‘A Call to Action to Improve Healthcare Safety Significantly and Sustainably’. This series of virtual meetings brought together healthcare experts from various parts of the healthcare industry to help start the process of “designing safety into the system.” Joseph discussed the role of the physical environment as a critical part of this system and the importance of leveraging the facility design process to minimize built environment latent conditions that adversely impact patient safety.

ARCHITECTURE — Sara Kennedy, a doctoral student working with Anjali Joseph at the Center for Health Facilities Design & Testing, received the 2023-2024 Arthur N. Tuttle Jr. Graduate Fellowship in Health Facility Planning from the AIA Academy of Architecture for Health (AAH) to support her dissertation research. She is studying the impact of the built environment on workflows and team communication during robotic-assisted surgery. The Tuttle fellowship aims to advance graduate students’ knowledge of planning and design for healthcare environments, resulting in a research-informed design approach and proposal. Kennedy received $8,600 through this award to support the completion of her dissertation study.

CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT – Associate Professor Jason Lucas and Assistant Professor Dhaval Gajjar organized a first-of-its-kind “Build Your Future” Upstate Hardhat Field Day Event on October 27^th at Carolina High School in Greenville. The event was sponsored by The Stanley Black and Decker Foundation and the Carolina AGC Foundation. The event brought 60 students from three Greenville County High Schools together to participate in a construction-focused curriculum developed by Lucas and Gajjar and construction science and management Ph.D. student Cayla Anderson Thomas. They were supported by members of the industry and the South Carolina Be Pro Be Proud Simulation truck in exposing high school students to possible careers in the construction industry. 

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE – Professor Mary G. Padua was invited by the University of Nevada’s School of Architecture (UNLV-SoA) to deliver the special lecture entitled, “Speculations on the Landscape”, on October 17^th in Las Vegas and sponsored by Klai Juba Wald as part of UNLV-SoA’s fall lecture series. Padua’s lecture discussed the impact of technology on trends in designed landscapes since the late 20^thcentury and her current research on “traumatic” urbanism and the post-World War II Asian-American diaspora and post-pandemic Health-based Axioms for Designed Outdoor Immersive Restorative Environments. 

CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING – Assistant Professor Enrique Ramos Santiago recently presented a peer-reviewed paper at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Chicago. The presentation of the paper titled ‘Planning and Urban Design Lessons from an Overlooked New Deal Village: Eleanor Roosevelt in San Juan of Puerto Rico’ was well attended, and an extended version of the paper is now under review in a high-ranking transportation science journal. Ramos-Santiago presented a novel approach to measuring accessibility to opportunities on foot that helps in evaluating distinct urban designs’ effectiveness in providing walking accessibility as a key attribute in human settlements. In addition, the paper presents a revelatory case of a New Deal village that has been overlooked in the city planning, urban design, and architecture literature for more than eight decades. Of the four cases compared, Eleanor Roosevelt Village more closely represents the attributes of new urbanist developments and registers markedly higher scores and ranking related to accessibility to multi-activities by foot. It also reveals the influence of context, culture, and governance regimes in the long-term evolutive trajectories of change and pedestrian accessibility in each case.

ART – Associate Professor Anderson Wrangle presented “The Outer Banks, The Carolinas, and Reflections on Topographic Photography Projects” at the SPE South Central/SouthEast Conference on October 22 at Columbus State University. In October, Wrangle’s work was also shown in the 2023 SECAC Members’ Exhibition at the SECAC Annual Conference in Richmond, VA; the 2023 Society for Photographic Education South Central and Southeast Members’ Exhibition at Columbus State University; and the 2023 Hambidge Art Center Auction in Atlanta.