HISTORY – Civil War History 64 (March 2018), pp. 56-91 featured Vernon Burton in a roundtable discussion of Nate Parker’s controversial 2016 film, “The Birth of a Nation.” Burton critiqued the filmmaker’s depiction of slavery and insurrection regarding Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. On April 7, Burton was featured in the Great Lectures Series in New York City and spoke on “How the Civil War Still Impacts Us Today.” On April 13, Burton commented on Confederate monuments and commemoration in a session at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Sacramento, California. The session was taped by C-SPAN.
ENGLISH — Professor Emeritus Wayne Chapman has published a new book, “W. B. Yeats’s Robartes-Aherne Writings: Featuring the Making of His Stories of Michael Robartes and His Friends‘ (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
HISTORY – Caroline Dunn published “Serving Isabella of France: From Queen Consort to Dowager Queen” in the book “Royal and Elite Households in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” edited by Theresa Earenfight, pp. 169-201 (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
ART – Andrea Feeser received a 2018-19 Faculty Research Development Program (Faculty Research Grant) for the project “Middle Earth: Artists Jimmie Durham and Maria Thereza Alves Investigate Ancient Mediterranean Culture and Its Legacy.” In addition, Feeser was elected to represent CAAH on the University General Education Committee.
ENGLISH – Walt Hunter published two poems in issue four of the journal Oversound. He presented a paper titled “The Location of Poetry and the Crisis of Global Capital” at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Los Angeles, on a panel he organized with Marijeta Bozovic called “Pointed Words: Poetry and Politics in the Global Present.”
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Elizabeth Jemison presented at the Organization of American Historians annual meeting held April 12-14 in Sacramento, California. Her presentation, “Christian Citizenship: Archives of Religion, Race and Belonging in the Post-Emancipation South,” was part of a panel titled “Telling Black Stories With White Sources” that addressed the methodological challenges of writing African American history given the preponderance of white voices in the archives.
ARCHITECTURE – Anjali Joseph, David Allison and doctoral student Rutali Joshi served as editors for the recently published booklet “Realizing Improved Patient Care Through Human-Centered Design in the Operating Room | Volume 2.” The new volume summarizes results and accomplishments from the second year of the RIPCHD.OR project and describes the design of the prototype. Projects from year two included iterative scenario-based simulations and statistical analysis of observational data. Anjali Joseph, Sara Bayramzadeh and other researchers at the Center for Health Facilities Design and Testing (CHFDT) authored two new papers that were published in Applied Ergonomics in April, “Using a Systems Approach to Evaluate a Circulating Nurse’s Work Patterns and Workflow Disruptions,” and “Using an Integrative Mock-up Simulation Approach for Evidence-based Evaluation of Operating Room Design Prototypes.” Another manuscript authored by CHFDT researchers, “The Influence of Traffic, Area Location, and Other Factors on Operating Room Microbial Load,” was published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.
ENGLISH – On April 4, Steve Katz and Stephen Moysey, an associate professor of environmental engineering and earth sciences, conducted a workshop on writing scientific proposals to funding agencies. It was their fourth and last session at Clemson University for the 2017-2018 academic year. The workshops morphed from the Writing Across the Disciplines initiative that Katz started in 2014 with Lesly Temesvari, Alumni Distinguished Professor of biological science. The workshops now focus on the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship Program (NSF-NRT) doctoral program in Critical Resilient Infrastructure at Clemson University, which is funded through Sez Atamturktur’s $3 million NSF-NRT grant. Katz and Moysey serve as co-principal investigators on the grant. Critical Resilient Infrastructure is an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, which draws doctoral students from across campus to work toward solving environmental and social problems by addressing infrastructure issues in poorer communities, such as flooding in the Lowcountry along the I-95 corridor.
LANGUAGES – Joseph Mai’s essay “Site 2: Style and Encounter in Rithy Panh’s Cinéma-Monde” appeared in the collection “Cinéma-Monde: Decentered Perspectives on Global Filmmaking in French,” edited by Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt, (Edinburgh University Press). The essay examines how the great Cambodian documentary filmmaker Rithy Panh addresses representations of a post-Khmer Rouge refugee camp to a world cinema audience.
LANGUAGES – Tiffany Creegan Miller published an article, “Performing Transnational Maya Experiences in Florida and San Juan Chamula in Workers in the Other World by Sna Jtz’ibajom and Robert M. Laughlin” in Hispanic Studies Review 3 (2018): pp. 46-62. This article draws from Maya storytelling techniques to examine the ways that Maya activists in Chiapas, Mexico, use theatre and performance to raise awareness about the challenges that Maya migrants and their families face, both in sending communities and the United States.
HISTORY – At the conference “1968 and the Tet Offensive” April 27-28 at Texas Tech University, Edwin Moise was one of three panelists at the opening plenary session, “The Tet Offensive in Historical Persepective.” He also presented the paper “Failures to Communicate” on the panel “Tet, Public Opinion, and the Election of 1968” and served as commentator on the panel “Rethinking the Tet Offensive: Hanoi’s Long-Term Victory in South Vietnam’s Provinces.”
CITY PLANNING AND REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT – Elora Raymond presented on “Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and the Uneven Housing Market Recovery,” focused on Los Angeles, at the American Association of Geographers annual meeting in New Orleans. At the Atlanta Studies Symposium, Ph.D. candidate Jermaine Durham presented a paper co-authored with Raymond. The paper analyzed homes owned by government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) and neighborhood instability following the foreclosure crisis. Raymond was quoted in a New York Times article “In 83 Million Eviction Records, a Sweeping and Intimate New Look at Housing in America,” which linked to her Atlanta Studies blog post “Evicted in Atlanta.”
LANGUAGES – Daniel J. Smith presented “Spanish and English Contact and the Order of Morpheme Acquisition” April 5 at the 2018 SouthEast Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures (SECCLL) in Savannah, Georgia. While referencing a “natural order” of the acquisition of morphemes in first and second language acquisition, the presentation highlighted how two languages can influence each other and make changes in the order of acquisition. Implications were made regarding teaching English and Spanish as second languages and for children learning both languages simultaneously.
LANGUAGES – Jae Takeuchi was invited to be a panelist for a discussion “On Knowledge, Skills, and Dispositions Expected of Future Japanese Language Educators” at the 27th meeting of the Central Association of Teachers of Japanese Conference, held at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She also presented her research at the same conference, in a talk titled “‘His Japanese Makes No Sense’ – Native Speaker Bias and Depictions of L2 Japanese Competence.”
LANGUAGES – Graciela Tissera presented her research April 6 at the SouthEast Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures, which was organized by Georgia Southern University. Her paper “‘Box 507’ (2002) by Enrique Urbizu: Crossroads of Human Spirit and Economic Systems” focused on the unforeseen outcomes of confrontations between companies investing in real estate. She also organized and chaired a session at the conference, “Individuals vs. Systems in Cinema,” to discuss the complex relationships portrayed inside and outside systems in multicultural environments and in relation to psychoanalysis, metaphysics, ethics, technology, health, business and gender. Tissera’s students, Jesse Bynum (Modern Languages-Spanish major with an English minor) and Hannah Cheeks (Psychology and Modern Languages-Spanish major) participated in the session. Bynum’s research paper “Systematic Defensive Memory and Psychological Trauma in David Carreras’ ‘Hipnos‘ (2004)” discussed dissociative identity disorders as coping mechanisms and experimental treatments for severely emotionally disturbed patients. Cheeks’ research paper “Exploring the Treacherous Systems of the Mind: Sergi Vizcaíno’s ‘Paranormal Xperience’ (2011),” centered on altered perceptions and symbols created by the unconscious mind as representations of systems influencing human behavior. The professional presentations were made possible through the Creative Inquiry program and Department of Languages travel grants.
ENGLISH – Jillian Weise presented on the panels “Hacking Norms and the Contested BodyMind” and “‘Against Death What Other Stay Than Love:’ Disabled Poets Read” at Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington. She also read at the University of Pittsburgh and was guest speaker for their Disability Studies Reading Group. Weise read ekphrastic poems at the Columbia Museum of Art for “Nothing to Hide: Four Writers Respond to Renée Cox and Imogen Cunningham.”
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Benjamin White has been awarded a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The research grant will support his project “The Authorship of the Pauline Epistles: The Promise and Limitations of Computational Methods.”