PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Richard Amesbury published “Political Theology between Reason and Will: Law, Decision, and the Self” in the Journal of Law, Religion and State and “Does Jurisprudence Require a Method to Be Rational?” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. Amesbury also signed a contract with Bloomsbury for an edited volume to be titled “Ethics After Wittgenstein.” He contributed to “Circumscribing the Body Politic: Circumcision, Religious Freedom and Identity in Europe,” an online symposium hosted by the Centre for Religion, Conflict and Globalisation at the University of Groningen. He spoke about his work on religion and human rights at Claremont School of Theology on March 20. In addition, Amesbury was appointed to the board of the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion.
PERFORMING ARTS – Anthony Bernarducci’s choral work titled “Crossing the Bar” was premiered by the Westminster Choir College Schola Cantorum on its spring tour to Virginia and North Carolina. The work is a setting of the Alfred Tennyson poem with the same title, which the poet wrote three years before his death. The poem employs the metaphor of a sand bar to describe the barrier between life and death.
HISTORY – Vernon Burton’s keynote address at the 2017 annual meeting of the South Carolina Historical Association, “Reconstructing South Carolina’s Reconstruction,” has been published (Columbia: Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 2018), pp 7-40. On March 28, a brief interview with Mandy Gaither aired on WYFF-TV in Greenville about the recent youth-led marches against gun violence and whether movements like this have historically had an impact. (The answer was yes, and Burton enjoyed placing today’s non-violent marches and protests in historical contexts.) As executive director of the College of Charleston’s Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program (CLAW), he welcomed participants to the “Freedom’s Gained and Lost: Reinterpreting Reconstruction in the Atlantic World” conference March 15-18 in Charleston, and presided over the plenary session. He also read a paper on W. E. B. DuBois’ iconic “Black Reconstruction.” As part of the conference, a historical marker was unveiled commemorating the integrated 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention site.
ENGLISH – Cameron Bushnell presented the paper “Expanding Professionalism through Meshed Linguistic Practices” on the panel “Center & Periphery: The Politics of Language Practices” at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Kansas City, Missouri, March 14-17.
ENGLISH – Professor Emeritus Wayne Chapman has published a new edition of “An Annotated Guide to the Writings and Papers of Leonard Woolf” (Clemson University Press, February 2018). With his wife, Janet M. Manson, Chapman reset this Third Edition (revised) for its first printing. Manson taught in English and History at Clemson and elsewhere. He is the new Associate Editor-in-Chief of The Timberline Review, the literary magazine of Willamette Writers (Oregon and Washington).
LANGUAGES – Pauline de Tholozany gave the keynote address at “Equinoxes,” the French Studies Graduate Conference on March 17 at Brown University. Her paper was titled “‘Sophie, avec impatience’: of Impatient Children, Broken Stuff, and Irritated Adults in 19th-Century France.” She also presented a paper at the Southeastern Women’s Studies Association, along with two Clemson Students, Surabhi Poola and Kaitlin Samuels. Their panel was titled “Of Plots, Readers, and Change: Norms and Transgressions in 19th-Century French Literature.”
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – The Clemson Ethics Bowl Team of Andy Ackerman, Caleb Hylkema, ChiChi Drayton-Smith, Kathleen Dudgeon and Ryan Sweeney competed at the prestigious Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl Nationals in Chicago. The team was led by coaches Adam Gies, Stephen Satris, Kelly Smith and Charlie Starkey, all of whom are faculty in the Department of Philosophy and Religion. The students debated a range of challenging ethical and policy issues, including the opioid epidemic and the proper role of sports at colleges. The Clemson team put in a strong performance, going 2-2 over four rounds and distinguishing themselves with their thoughtful, well-researched, and organized presentations.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Steven Grosby’s article “Nationality and Religion” appeared in the journal Nations and Nationalism 24/2 (2018): 1-13. In addition, his chapter “Philip Rieff as Cultural Critic” appeared in a volume edited by Jonathan Imber, “Philip Rieff as Social Theorist” (Bath: Anthem, March 2018), pp. 41-63.
LANGUAGES – Daniel Holcombe was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Research in Gender Studies, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal that aims to publish critical and theoretical constructive contributions across the spectrum of humanities.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Elizabeth Jemison published the chapter “Gendering the History of Race and Religion” in the “Oxford Handbook of Race and Religion in American History,” edited by Paul Harvey and Kathryn Gin Lum, which was released this month by Oxford University Press.
ENGLISH – Steve Katz presented at the first plenary session of the annual conference of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing March 14 in Kansas City, Kansas. While in the city, he also participated on the roundtable, “Rhetoricking toward Transnational and Transformative Writing Pedagogies” at the Conference of College Composition and Communication Convention on March 15. The title of his presentation was “Ethics of Teaching Reading and Writing in Judaism: What Might We Learn?” Katz and Stephen Moysey, an associate professor of environmental engineering and earth sciences at Clemson, conducted two workshops at the Watt Family Innovation Center for doctoral students, one on writing the proposal for National Science Foundation grants and the other on writing a project summary.
HISTORY – Thomas Kuehn presented the paper “Lorenzo de’ Medici and Inheritance Law in Florence” March 9 at the 21st Biennial New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Sarasota, Florida. Kuehn also delivered “Estate Inventories as Legal Instruments of Credit in Renaissance Italy” March 23 at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in New Orleans. His article “Bartolus as a Petrarchan Legist? Defining Family in Law” appeared in a special issue of the journal Studi Petrarcheschi.
PERFORMING ARTS – Eric Lapin has been accepted to the South Carolina Humanities Speakers Bureau: Humanities Out Loud project. Through the program, organizations can apply for grants that allow them to schedule Lapin to speak on topics of jazz history; classical music history; music and politics; and arts entrepreneurship.
ENGLISH – Michael LeMahieu participated in a roundtable discussion at Yale University hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Center following a performance of Suzan-Lori Parks’ play “Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts I, II & III.” LeMahieu also delivered a paper, “Harper Lee’s Swept Yards,” at the Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference hosted by University of Texas at Austin. While at UT-Austin, LeMahieu conducted archival research at the Harry Ransom Center, which awarded him the Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship for 2018.
ENGLISH – Dominic Mastroianni presented a paper on Thoreau, “Hearing With the Side of the Ear,” at the Biennial Conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, hosted by the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, March 22-25.
LANGUAGES – Tiffany Creegan Miller presented at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) in Los Angeles March 27-29. Her presentation “Orality and Translation in Print and Digital Recordings of Humberto Ak’abal’s Sound Poetry” was part of a seminar on topographies of sound and music in Spanish and Latin American literature and film. While in California, Miller was also invited to discuss her work with Kaqchikel Maya communities in Guatemala on the Maya radio program “Contacto Ancestral,” which airs in Los Angeles on the community radio station KPFK.
LANGUAGES – Arelis Moore de Peralta just returned from a spring break trip to the Dominican Republic, along with her Creative Inquiry and “Tigers Building Healthier Communities Abroad (TBHCA)” students. Moore and six students conducted research in an effort to develop sustainable, collaborative interventions to improve health and well-being in a low-resource community. This was the third TBHCA trip to the Dominican community of Las Malvinas II. This time, Moore and her group collaborated with a colleague from Boston University’s School of Social Work and their local partner university, Universidad Iberoamericana (UNIBE). Together they conducted two focus groups and a “photovoice” project with the youth of Las Malvinas II to identify effective ways to engage them in local health improvement efforts.
ARCHITECTURE – Hala Nassar and Robert Hewitt represented Clemson University as the American team of urban designers at the International Collaborative Urban Design Studio Meeting March 16-24 in Cairo. Along with teams from Huazhong Agricultural University in China and Ain Shams University in Egypt, they traveled to the Red Sea Governate, Egypt, to begin field research on urban design proposals for the city of Hurghada. Upon completion of their field studies, the teams met with the Governor of the Red Sea to discuss his plans for the city and the presentation of final project proposals to the Prime Minister of Egypt. As part of the international collaboration, Nassar and Hewitt attended a reception at El-Zafaran Palace in Cairo, where they conferred with the President of Ain Shams University. The trip culminated with a final presentation of teams’ field study analysis on March 24 to dignitaries from Ain Shams University and Professor Gao Chi, Vice President of Huazhong University.
ENGLISH – R. Barton Palmer edited a special issue on Langston Hughes in South Atlantic Review 83 No. 1, with guest editor Tara Green. He also edited The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 17, which includes Palmer’s annotated edition of Williams’ previously unpublished “Provisional Film Treatment of ‘A Gentleman Caller,’” pp. 5-36, the first known draft of the play that would later be produced as “The Glass Menagerie.” The Review also includes Palmer’s article “‘Period of Adjustment’ in Context: Tennessee Williams and Noël Coward,” 147-166.
ENGLISH – Elizabeth Rivlin presented a paper in a seminar, “Shakespeare and the Modern Novel,” at the Shakespeare Association of America Annual Meeting March 29-31 in Los Angeles. Her paper is titled “Anne Tyler’s Middlebrow Shakespeare and the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.”
ENGLISH – Geveryl L. Robinson was selected to be one of the contributors to the nationally distributed Black Panther Syllabus, curated by Brandon W. Jones and Shawn J. Moore. She was chosen from more than 150 people who submitted works to the syllabus, which was inspired by the blockbuster film of the same title.
ARCHITECTURE – Kate Schwennsen, FAIA, spoke on “Achieving an Equitable and Inclusive Profession” at the 2018 Women in Architecture Celebration in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 8 — International Women’s Day. Rick Jackson of WVIZ/WCPN Ideastream Public Television led the conversation “An Evening With Kate,” which was attended by approximately 100 people (during a blizzard). Schwennsen also appeared in a broadcasted interview the same day.
LANGUAGES – Jae Takeuchi has been awarded the Hamako Ito Chaplin Memorial Award for excellence in Japanese language teaching. The national award is given out to only one or two instructors of Japanese each year. Takeuchi also presented her research “Our Language”– an autoethnographic analysis of Japanese Dialect Use in L1/L2 Interaction” at the annual American Association of Teachers of Japanese annual conference in Washington.
LANGUAGES – On March 14, Graciela Tissera presented her research at the Congreso Internacional Interdisciplinario “La ciudad: imágenes e imaginarios,” which was organized by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. Her paper entitled “La ciudad a través del cine: visión del individuo y los sistemas” focused on the portrayal of the cities of Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and Barcelona in the following movies: “Secuestro Express,” by Jonathan Jakubowicz (Venezuela, 2005); “Cidade de Deus,” by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund (Brazil, 2002); and “Biutiful,” by Alejandro González Iñárritu (Spain, 2010). The analysis explored the profile of the cities as structured systems and their influence on the individual from social, cultural, economic and philosophical perspectives.
ENGLISH – Jillian Weise’s poem “Nondisabled Demands” appeared in the Academy of American Poets digital series Poem-a-Day. The series reaches more than 350,000 readers. Her poem “I Want Your Fax” was republished in an online anthology of disability poetics. Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights group, featured Weise’s performance art, “EZ Breezy Assisted Suicide,” on their site.