HISTORY – Rod Andrew’s biography of Andrew Pickens, “The Life and Times of General Andrew Pickens: Revolutionary War Hero, American Founder” (UNC Press, 2017), has received the 2019 Harry M. Ward Book Award. This award is given by the American Revolution Round Table of Richmond for the best book on the Revolutionary period published during the preceding two years.
PERFORMING ARTS – Anthony Bernarducci led the Clemson University Cantorei in a world premiere of his new work, “Evening Gale,” on Oct. 24. The piece is scored for choir, piano, cello and percussion. “Evening Gale” is a multi-movement piece inspired by Carl Sandburg’s “Prairie Waters by Night,” Robert Frost’s “Acquainted With the Night,” and an excerpt from Joaquin Miller’s “A Song of Creation.” He also was a guest conductor at the South Carolina American Choral Directors Association state convention. The concert took place at Charleston Southern University and premiered Bernarducci’s new work “Mother Shed No Mournful Tears,” a setting of the poem “The Young Warrior” by James Weldon Johnson.
NIERI FAMILY DEPARTMENT OF CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT – The Fourth Annual Design and Construction Industry Symposium was held on Oct. 10 in Greenville, with opening remarks by Mike Jackson and featuring Greenville Mayor Knox White along with department professors and industry professionals. Joe Burgett, Shima Clarke and Jason Lucas served as panel moderators. The keynote address was given by Clemson Economics Professor Raymond “Skip” Sauer.
NIERI FAMILY DEPARTMENT OF CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT – Ehsan Mousavi led a group of CSM students to a first-place finish in the Associated Schools of Construction Open Concrete Division Competition, sponsored by Baker Concrete and held from Oct. 22-24 in Peachtree City, Georgia. For the extraordinary effort, the team bought home a trophy and a $1,500 check. Mousavi’s students placed second in 2018, their first time participating in the competition’s Open Concrete Division. Another group of CSM students under the leadership of Joe Burgett brought home a $1,500 check for Best Presentation in the 2019 Commercial Division Competition, sponsored by Holder Construction. The Clemson teams were in direct competition with peer programs in construction education, including Auburn University, the University of Florida, Virginia Tech and Mississippi State.
HISTORY – Vernon Burton’s analysis of Big Data at Clemson appears in the article “Sherpas of Supercomputing: Drivers of Discovery,” by Lucy Birmingham and Mark Matthews for the American Society for Engineering Education’s Prism Magazine. (“For the historian, powerful computers are key to discerning patterns… ‘Numbers do matter.’”) The authors also mentioned Clemson’s plans to launch the nation’s first Ph.D. program in digital history in 2021. Burton’s review of Edward L. Ayers’ “The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America” appeared in The Journal of the Civil War Era, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 493-496. He presented a paper on the “Reconstruction Migrations” at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History on Oct. 4. Burton was quoted in an Oct. 17 article in the Greenwood Index Journal about how Benjamin E. Mays inspired Congressman Elijah Cummings. Burton gave the “Reflections on Furman” speech at the school’s homecoming reunion on Oct. 18. He also took part in Rhondda Robinson Thomas’ plenary roundtable about “Slavery, Its Legacies and the Built Landscapes of South Carolina’s Universities” on Oct. 25 at the College of Charleston.
PERFORMING ARTS – Paul Buyer will receive the Outstanding PAS Service Award on Nov. 15 at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Indianapolis.
HISTORY – Elizabeth Carney, Professor Emerita, published “Women and Masculinity in the ‘Life of Alexander’” in Illinois Classical Studies 44,1 (2019) pp. 141-55.
ART – Rachel de Cuba was invited to exhibit works as a part of the installation “Cinema Reset” at the New Orleans Film Festival. De Cuba’s video installation works were on view Oct.16-23 at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans. This programming was supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation and was curated by Rachel Lin Weaver. Works by de Cuba and artists Matthew Batty and Cristina Molina focused on new media approaches of storytelling in the southern region of the United States.
ENGLISH – Jordan Frith presented “The Bounded Norms of Virtual Reality” on Oct. 4 at the Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC) conference in Portland, Oregon, presented by the Association for Computing Machinery.
HISTORY – H. Roger Grant has been re-elected to the board of directors of Lexington Group Inc. at its annual meeting held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Grant’s 35th academic book, “Transportation and the American People,” was published by Indiana University Press. This is the third title in a social history trilogy for the IU Press, which also included “Railroads and the American People” (2012) and “Electric Interurbans and the American People” (2016).
ARCHITECTURE – Robert Hewitt was selected as a Fellow in the Council of Fellows of the American Society of Landscape Architects and appointed as an Honorary Professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo. His fellowship is among the highest honors the American Society of Landscape Architects bestows on its members, recognizing the sustained contributions of individuals to their profession and society at large. He is the first regular faculty member in the landscape architecture program at Clemson to have received this honor, and will be inducted in a formal ceremony at the society’s annual convention this month in San Diego. Hewitt participated in a panel and offered lectures and a keynote address as part of the formal ceremonies appointing him Honorary Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Faculty of Engineering at Ain Shams University. Ain Shams University is ranked globally, and is a leading University in Egypt, North Africa and the Middle East.
ARCHITECTURE – Carter L. Hudgins, Director Emeritus of the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation, published “Jamestown, Nevis and Urban Resilience in the Early English Caribbean” in the book “Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean: Contextualizing Sites through Colonialism, Capitalism, and Globalism,” edited by Todd M. Ahlman and Gerald F. Schroedl.
ENGLISH – Walt Hunter published an article in American Literary History called “Contemporary Poetry and Capitalism.” He presented a paper on Robert Lowell at the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers conference in Worcester, Massachusetts, and a paper on Muriel Rukeyser at the Modernist Studies Association conference in Toronto, Canada.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – The department’s recent proposal (in partnership with the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities and the Rutland Institute for Ethics) to host the journal Teaching Ethics was successful. Beginning in January, the journal of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum will be housed here at Clemson, with Stephen Satris serving as editor and Edyta Kuzian as associate editor.
ARCHITECTURE: Peter Laurence and Andreea Mihalache co-chaired the annual conference of the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, held Oct. 9-12 in Greenville and co-hosted with the Clemson School of Architecture. Extremely well-attended, with more than 120 participants ranging from academics to preservationists, the conference was the second largest in the history of the organization. The keynote speaker, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a renowned architectural critic and author, also gave a talk in the School of Architecture as part of its fall lecture series focusing on Contemporary Cities.
ARCHITECTURE – Amalia Leifeste was the chair of the conference committee and a moderator for the session “Vernacular Environment” at the National Council for Historic Preservation (NCPE) conference held in Denver. The conference brought together students and preservation educators to share current work and discuss pedagogy.
ENGLISH – The Times Literary Supplement in London reviewed Melissa Edmundson Makala’s edited collection “Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890-1940” (Handheld Press).
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – William Maker, Professor Emeritus, presented the paper “Capitalism and Nihilism” on Oct. 25 at the 26th Annual Vincentian Business Ethics Conference at the Dublin City University All Hallows Campus in Ireland.
LANGUAGES – Tiffany Creegan Miller was invited to give a guest lecture via videoconference on Oct. 18 to a medical Spanish class at Brown University about her work as a trilingual interpreter/translator (Kaqchikel Maya – Spanish – English) working with underserved Kaqchikel Maya patients in Guatemala.
LANGUAGES – Arelis Moore de Peralta was an invited faculty guest Oct.14-15 at West Chester University in Philadelphia. West Chester’s Department of Languages and Culture asked her to share information about our Language and International Health Program (L&IH) to inform its development of a similar B.S. program. She met with the deans of Arts and Humanities and Health Sciences to talk about Clemson’s program, and also with the faculty from the Department of Languages and Cultures. In a meeting with the director of the Center for International Programs, Moore de Peralta spoke about her experience running a study abroad program in the Dominican Republic. Her visit to West Chester also included a public panel on “Spanish in the Professions” with four professionals from other disciplines, and a presentation about her study abroad and Creative Inquiry project in the Dominican Republic, “Building Healthier Communities in a Cross-Cultural Context Through Community-Academic Partnerships.” Her presentation and panel attracted students and faculty from various departments at the university.
ENGLISH – Chelsea Murdock presented “Remaking the Center: Exhibitions, Space, Art, and Community” at the International Writing Center Association Conference on Oct. 17 in Columbus, Ohio.
ENGLISH – Angela Naimou was invited to participate in the international symposium “Liquid Borders/Fronteras Líquidas,” hosted by Washington University in St. Louis, where she presented her work as part of a two-day event that brought together scholars from Latin America, Europe and the United States. She also joined several English department colleagues in attending the ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present) conference hosted by the University of Maryland, College Park. There, Naimou presented her research as part of a panel on literature and human rights; shared work in progress at a seminar on literature of exile, refuge and migration; and facilitated a panel on the contemporary arts and refugee spaces.
ARCHITECTURE – Winifred Elysse Newman was a plenary speaker for the International Conference on Infrastructure and Construction held from Oct. 11-12 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her topic was “Building Software and Big Data: Thoughts on the Future of the Building Practices.” She also served as a board member of the Campus Alliance for Advanced Visualization and as a panelist at its fourth annual conference, “Impacts,” held from Oct. 14-17 at Indiana University Bloomington.
PERFORMING ARTS – Lisa Sain Odom taught a master class to voice students from schools throughout South Carolina at the Fall Workshop for the South Carolina National Association of Teachers of Singing. Clemson theater and music (voice) students Seth Hilderbrand, Copeland Lewis and Kevin Arnold all advanced to the regional round of competition after singing in the association’s fall musical theater auditions.
PERFORMING ARTS – Shannon Robert started production work with Cincinnati Shakespeare for its presentation of “Merry Wives of Windsor,” directed by Brian Phillips, which runs Nov. 15-Dec. 7.
ARCHITECTURE – Thomas Schurch was one of two members credited with an important development for the American Society of Landscape Architects: the creation of an Urban Design award beginning in 2020, which will celebrate “the craft and beauty that landscape architects add to the daily lives of people and communities in dense urban places.” He serves as the society’s co-chair of the Urban Design Professional Practice Network.
ENGLISH – Michelle Smith published the chapter “In Rosie’s Shadow: World War II Recruitment Rhetoric and Women’s Work in Public Memory” in the book “Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor,” edited by David Gold and Jessica Enoch (University of Pittsburgh Press).
ENGLISH – Rhondda Robinson Thomas facilitated a roundtable discussion, “Slavery, Its Legacies and the Built Landscapes of South Carolina’s Universities,” at the “Architectures of Slavery: Ruins and Reconstructions Symposium,” held Oct. 24-26 at the College of Charleston. Participants included Vernon Burton from Clemson and professors from the College of Charleston, Claflin University, the Citadel, Furman University and the University of South Carolina. Thomas and the roundtable participants will contribute revised papers to an essay collection edited and published by symposium organizers.
LANGUAGES – Graciela Tissera published “Los castillos y la ficción: la cinematografía del espacio laberíntico” in Diablotexto, a journal of literary criticism from the University of Valencia in Spain. The article explores the labyrinthine spaces of castles as they are portrayed in the 1966 film “Eye of the Devil,” directed by J. Lee Thompson, and the 1999 film “The Ninth Gate,” directed by Roman Polanski and based on the 1993 novel “El Club Dumas” by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In these movies, images of castles symbolically recreate supernatural enigmas, projecting an elusive and ubiquitous presence that opens a portal to the unknown.
LANGUAGES – Eric Touya was invited to attend the 2019 French-American Business Awards Gala organized by the French-American Chamber of Commerce of the Carolinas. The B.A. in French and International Business at Clemson was nominated for an award in the category “Education and Culture.” Students in the major have recently found jobs in major international companies like L’Oréal, Chanel and Michelin. Hundreds of companies’ representatives attended the gala held Oct. 10 at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina. Other guests included North Carolina’s Secretary of Commerce, Anthony Copeland, and the Consul General of France for the Southeastern U.S.
ENGLISH – Caitlin G. Watt published “Car vallés sui et nient mescine’: Trans Heroism and Literary Masculinity in Le Roman de Silence” in “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism,” a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum edited by Dorothy Kim and M. W. Bychowski.
ART – Valerie Zimany was featured in the Cluj International Ceramics Biennale held Oct. 2-15 at the Cluj-Napoca Museum of Art in Romania. The international jury included Monika Gass, former director of Keramikmuseum Westerwaldf in Germany, and members of the International Academy of Ceramics. Her artwork also was featured at Northern Clay Center in “Horror Vacui: Across the Margins,” an exhibition of works inspired by visual excess. The manner of installation was intended to exacerbate and inspire tensions in the exhibition space and featured wallpaper designed by the artists. Zimany presented an artist lecture for the opening reception on Sept. 20, and the exhibition in Minneapolis, Minnesota, ran through Nov. 3.