Todd Anderson (art) received a grant through The Sustainable Arts Foundation to help fund the purchase of his own printmaking press. More than 1,300 individuals applied for the grant, and Anderson was one of only two visual artists to receive the award. In other work over the summer, Anderson conducted research visits to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, as well as the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. The purpose of his visits was to collect data about the glaciers of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado as well as those on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. In related research, Anderson and co-PI Bruce Crownover (University of Wisconsin-Madison) conducted fieldwork at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, hiking to the park’s remaining eight glaciers. This project, “Rocky Mountain National Park: The Last Glacier,” is being funded in part by a Clemson University Project Initiation Grant. Finally, a two-person exhibition, “The Last Glacier: Todd Anderson and Bruce Crownover,” opened at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison, Wisconsin on June 14th.
Anthony Bernarducci (performing arts) had a feature article published in the Florida Music Director journal. It was titled “The Neutral Syllable: Sending a Soundscape of Subliminal Messages,” focusing on pedagogy in the choral rehearsal.
Caroline Dunn (history) presented the paper “‘If there be any goodly young woman’: Female Servants in Aristocratic Households” at the annual Harlaxton Medieval Symposium in England. This year’s conference theme was “The Great Household, 1000-1500.”
Linda Dzuris (performing arts) was commissioned to write a piece for carillon by Yale University in celebration of their student guild’s 50th anniversary. It was premiered in June in New Haven on Yale’s 43-ton instrument during a congress of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America. Also premiered by Dzuris were newly released arrangements from her second volume of Yiddish Carillon Music, published by American Carillon Music Editions, and Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody in Blue, published by the guild. Other summer concerts were performed in Michigan: Grand Valley State University, Cook Carillon, Allendale; Grand Valley State University, Beckering Family Carillon, Grand Rapids; Kirk in the Hills Presbyterian Church, Bloomfield Hills; St. Hugo of the Hills Catholic Church, Bloomfield Hills; and Oakland University, Elliott Carillon, Rochester.
Andrea Feeser (art) worked with student artists over the summer to study and represent how colonial and early republican white South Carolinians displaced Cherokees from their town Esseneca, the land Clemson University sits upon. The primary outcomes of this project consists of two major, collaborative artworks. The first is a large-scale print and drawing by recent BFA graduate Kevin Pohle, in a handcrafted frame created by recent BFA graduate Chip Sox, which addresses native and colonist use of the Cherokee medicinal plant Indian root. The second is a photograph by MFA candidate Haley Floyd of historical Esseneca lands, which are currently under development to expand the university’s athletic district. Both of these artworks will be displayed on campus at sites that will encourage reflection on the university’s past uses of its lands. Feeser’s project was supported in part by a College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities faculty research development grant.
On June 11th C-Span showed H. Roger Grant’s lecture, “Electric Interurbans,” from his History of American Transportation class. C-Span has archived this presentation, and it can be viewed at any time. Grant is the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of History
In July Professor Steven Grosby (philosophy and religion) published the following:
Walt Hunter (English) was named the 2017 South Carolina Arts Commission Poetry Fellow. The $5,000 fellowship was awarded to four South Carolina artists in the categories of prose, poetry, dance choreography and dance performance.
Thomas J. Kuehn (history) published “Property of Spouses in Law in Renaissance Florence,” in Family Law and Society in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Era, ed. Maria Gigliola di Renzo Villata (New York: Springer, 2016), 109-134.
Joey Manson’s (art) sculpture, Slip, was installed in the Chicago Sculpture Exhibit in Chicago Illinois, in June, and will be on display for one year.
Steven G. Marks’ book The Information Nexus: Global Capitalism from the Renaissance to the Present was published this summer by Cambridge University Press. Marks is Clemson University Alumni Distinguished Professor of History.
Professors Hala Nassar and Robert Hewitt (landscape architecture) were invited by Huazhong Agricultural University’s department of landscape architecture in Wuhan, China to teach an urban design studio during June and July. The invitation was due in large part to Nassar and Hewitt’s international award from the 10th Annual China Garden Design Competition where they received third prize. The “vertical” studio course taught in China consisted of 30 students at undergraduate, masters and doctoral levels, and addressed a site known as Fang Island on the Yangtze River. The city of Wuhan experienced overwhelming flooding twice while Professors Nassar and Hewitt where on campus in China. Turning the devastating events into teaching opportunity, their urban design studio addressed the challenging conditions by incorporating resilient city and sustainable urban design concepts in their design approaches. At the conclusion of the studio, the University President Xiuxin Deng and Vice President Professor GAO Shi bestowed Huazhong Agricultural University’s highest level of accolade granted to a foreign professor by appointing Nassar and Hewitt guest professors (2016-2019) – the first foreign professors to receive this honor.
Elizabeth Rivlin (English) presented a paper at the World Shakespeare Congress in Stratford upon Avon in the UK, which took place August 1-6. Her paper was titled “‘Everyday Shakespeare’ in the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle” and was part of a seminar titled “Everyday Shakespeare.”
Greg Shelnutt (art) participated in ThinkTank9: Citizen/Artist: Education and Agency at Montana State University in Bozeman in June. Hosted by the Montana State University School of Art, TT9 brought together art and design master and emerging teachers and administrators to address thematic issues of higher education. The workshop employed a mix of facilitated discussions, workshops and presentations, interspersed with informal meals and social interaction.
Eric Touya (languages) presented “Fluid Selves in Isabelle Eberhardt’s ‘In the Shadow of Islam’: Gender, Cross-Cultural, and Nomadic Identities” at the Women in French Conference at Gettysburg College in June. He was also scholar-in-residence at the University of Virginia while participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
Rhondda Robinson Thomas (English) was selected as a fellow for the “Hearing the Inarticulate: Ethics and Epistemology in the Archives” Seminar and Writing Retreat at the Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, June 20-29, 2016, where she gave a public talk and wrote biographical essays about African American convict laborers who helped to build Clemson University.
Kathleen Thum (art) was awarded a quarterly support grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission to help cover the cost of travel and supplies for her Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming in May and June.
This fall Jillian Weise (English) is guest editor-in-residence at The Iowa Review.
Benjamin L. White (religious studies) co-authored an article with Alexander Batson, an undergraduate student majoring in religious studies, that was accepted into the blind, double-peer reviewed journal The Journal for the Study of Paul and His Letters. The article, entitled, “Paul’s Collection through the Saints: Romans 15:31 in Papyrus 46” explores a little known textual variant in the earliest manuscript of Paul’s letters and stems from research in a course on early Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In June White delivered an invited paper entitled “Paul and Justin” at an international gathering of scholars in Rome, Italy. The 30-person seminar was the 7th Nangeroni Meeting of the Enoch Seminar and was partially subsidized by the Michigan Center for Early Christian Studies.
Valerie Zimany (art) was promoted to associate professor. During the month of July, she received a competitive South Carolina State Arts Commission quarterly project grant for artists to conduct research on ceramic imagery and three-dimensional printing as a resident artist at Medalta International Artists in Residence, Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada. Zimany was awarded the artist residency as the grand prize recipient of Medalta’s 2015 International Juried Exhibition, in which her artwork was acquired into Medalta’s permanent museum collection. During the residency, Zimany held a master class, “COLOUR @Medalta,” on Japanese Kutani enamels and their contemporary application from July 23-24, 2016. The residency was also made possible through a faculty research award from the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities.