ARCHITECTURE – Anjali Joseph, David Allison, Sahar Mihandoust, and graduate students Rutali Joshi, Roxana Jafarifiroozabadi and Lisa Hoskins, along with other Center for Health Facilities Design and Testing researchers, presented work online for European Healthcare Design 2020 – “At the Tipping Point: Designing for Population and Planetary Health,” held Sept. 14-17. The team’s presentations included: “CU@Home – Proactively Managing Safe Transitions to Home After Joint Replacement Surgery,” “What Do Care Partners Find Important in a Surgery Waiting Room?,” “Exploring the Relationship Between Access to Nature Views and Nurse Burnout,” “The Impact of Single-Family Room Design on Family Engagement in the Neonatal ICU,” “Designing the Physician Workspace to Support Handovers in the Emergency Department,” “Translating Research Into Practice: A Web-Based ‘Safe Operating Room Design’ Tool to Support Evidence-Based Design Decision-Making” and “The Future of an Architecture for Health.”
ART – Several of Todd Anderson’s fine art prints are currently on loan to Universal Pictures as set decorations for the filming of “Dear Evan Hansen.” The set designer shared that she has been wanting to utilize Anderson’s work for the last couple films she has worked on, and “Dear Evan Hansen” was “finally the right fit.” Ben Platt and Julianne Moore lead the cast in this film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical. Despite not being told where they are filming, Anderson said he remains “foolishly optimistic in his hope of meeting Moore. Dream on.”
CITY PLANNING AND REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT – Robert Benedict recently presented a webinar at the Environmental Protection Agency’s virtual conference hosted by its College/Underserved Community Partnership Program. His topic was Greenville County’s historic Union Bleachery: “Bringing a Forgotten Icon of the Textile Crescent Back to Life.” Union Bleachery was a practicum project for Master of Real Estate Development students, who worked closely with the EPA, the San Souci community and Greenville County officials to create adaptive reuse plans for the historic mill and the surrounding mill village.
HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY – Vernon Burton spoke about Harvey Gantt’s integration of Clemson on the Sept. 4 edition of sportswriter Larry Williams’ weekly podcast. On Sept. 12, “While I Breathe, I Hope” won the Southeast Emmy Award in the documentary-topical category; Burton was the history consultant for the documentary about Bakari Seller’s unsuccessful campaign for South Carolina lieutenant governor. The film concludes with the mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. On Sept. 18, C-SPAN began sharing the recording of last month’s Lincoln’s Cottage Scholar Session, “The Civil War – Confederate Monuments and Memorials,” featuring Burton and his former graduate student Edna Greene Medford, who is now a history professor and associate provost of Howard University. Also in September, C-SPAN rebroadcast Burton’s 2018 Capitol Hill talk on “Origins of the 14th Amendment.” On Sept. 30, Burton led a Zoom workshop-lecture on the 1965 Voting Rights Act for the Richmond (Virginia) Racial Reconciliation group.
ART — Rachel de Cuba presented a talk for the University of Indianapolis about her studio-based research as a Provost Pathways Fellow in Art at Clemson. Her talk was a part of the Fall University of Indianapolis Art and Design Lecture Series that offers undergraduate students the opportunity to engage with speakers currently working in visual art careers.
ART — Andrea Feeser’s book “Jimmie Durham, Europe, and the Art of Relations,” which was published Sept. 25 by Routledge, examines the recent work of artist Jimmie Durham, whose five-decade career investigates how historical and cultural interactions among varied beings and places shape aesthetic and social experiences.
ENGLISH – Gabriel Hankins was put on the short list for the Modernist Studies Association’s First Book Prize. Hankins’ “Interwar Modernism and the Liberal World Order: Offices, Institutions, and Aesthetics after 1919” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. The award committee wrote the following: “Gabriel Hankins brings a revelatory perspective to the interwar kaleidoscope of modernist politics… The book changes what the political looks like and means for modernist studies.”
PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian “Mickey” Harder reports that Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor, performed at the Brooks Center on Nov. 4, 2019, was broadcast on Sept. 9, 2020 on American Public Media’s radio program “Performance Today.” The musicians were cellist Peter Wiley and pianist Anna Polonsky. The performance was recorded as a part of the Utsey Chamber Series at the Brooks Center. The Utsey Series was created by Lillian and her husband, Dr. Byron Harder.
ENGLISH – Walt Hunter was the James Merrill House Writer-in-Residence in Stonington, Connecticut for the month of September. Hunter reflected on poetry, the James Merrill House and fellow writers in a profile in the CT Examiner, an online newspaper based in Old Lyme.
LANGUAGES – Jason Hurdich participated in an online panel of national and regional Deaf leaders, “Multigenerational Panel: How Much Has The Deaf Community Changed Over The Last 50 Years?” The Sept. 24 discussion celebrated International Week of the Deaf (#IWDeaf), sponsored by the Deaf Literacy Center of Pinellas County (Florida) Library Cooperative. The week of celebration is an initiative of the World Federation of the Deaf and was first launched in 1958 in Rome.
ARCHITECTURE – Anjali Joseph delivered an online presentation, “A Human Centered and Evidence-based Approach to Operating Room Design,” for the China Construction Hospital Conference, held Sept. 18-20. The overall focus of the conference was a discussion of how to guide the transformation of modern hospitals from passive medical treatment toward active health through the construction innovation concept. Joseph also coauthored an article published in Landscape Architecture in September, “Human Health Assessments of Green Infrastructure Designs Using Virtual Reality.”
HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY – With Clemson Humanities Hub funding, Pam Mack was able to invite three scholars – whose books she assigned – to speak to her students over Zoom this fall. The three scholars and their books are Barbara Hahn (“Technology in the Industrial Revolution”), John H. Lienhard (“Inventing Modern: Growing Up with X-Rays, Skyscrapers, and Tailfins”) and David E. Nye (“Technology Matters: Questions to Live With”).
ENGLISH – Amy Monaghan was invited to lead a virtual seminar on the film “Children of Men” for the Coolidge Corner Theatre, an independent, nonprofit cinema and cultural institution in the greater Boston area. Online, Coolidge educational programming has featured lectures by Stephanie Zacharek of Time, David Fear of Rolling Stone, Sam Adams of Slate, and Bilge Ebiri of New York magazine, as well as Boston-area academics. Marketing and education manager Wesley Emblidge reported that the “Children of Men” event was the top seminar for all of September.
ENGLISH – Angela Naimou delivered the opening lecture for the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University as part of the center’s Fall 2020 Monday Night Lecture series on the theme “Dirt.” Naimou’s talk, “Detention Operations,” was followed by a colloquium with faculty and student center fellows the next day. Naimou also presented part of her current work locally at the Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design Research Forum. Her essay, “Genres in Detention,” was published in the Post-45 Contemporaries forum “Extraordinary Renditions,” edited by Kalyan Nadiminti. The essay reflects on the limitations of a US-centered collective imagination of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. It turns to Black and Iraqi diasporic literature and art to think about the global links between race, empire, policing, and prisons.
ENGLISH – Allen Swords started a virtual book club that will meet three times per month in the evenings on Zoom, beginning in October. “I have a lot of enthusiasm and high hopes for a fun, yet rigorous academic experience for all of us,” Swords said. This free club is open to Clemson alumni, colleagues, staff, any friends and any interested parties. The book club’s Facebook page already has more than 225 members. The first book is Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “All the Things We Cannot See.” For November, the group will tackle William Goldman’s 1973 novel, “The Princess Bride.”
LANGUAGES – Jae DiBello Takeuchi published “Our Language – Linguistic Ideologies and Japanese Dialect Use in L1/L2 Interaction” in Japanese Language and Literature, Vol. 54 (2), pp. 167-197. Takeuchi also published “Diversity, Inclusivity, and the Importance of L2 Speaker Legitimacy” in the same issue, pp. 317-325. This article was part of a special section on Language and Pedagogy in Japanese language teaching.
ENGLISH – Rhondda Robinson Thomas was one of four panelists featured at the Speaks-Warnock Symposium on Race and Racism at the University hosted Sept. 29 by the University of Delaware via Zoom. Thomas made a presentation about her ”Call My Name“ project and then engaged in a roundtable discussion about the challenges and successes of launching and sustaining campus history initiatives.
ENGLISH – Jillian Weise was invited to speak with a creative writing class at American University in Washington. She spoke about page poetics and stage poetics. Weise produced “A Kim Deal Party,” a video play profiled here, which screened at the art gallery Public Space One on Sept. 19 and 20. Weise said: “‘A Kim Deal Party’ is on ‘crip time,’” explaining that theorist Ellen Samuels wrote that crip time is time travel. “The party continues and it is accessible by link to fellow cyborgs, disabled and Deaf people,” Weise said. “If that describes your identity, then you are invited. If not, then you are not invited.” Email Jillian Weise (jweise@clemson.edu) for the link.
ART – Valerie Zimany’s solo exhibition “And I Was Covered in Blossoms” opened Sept. 10 and remains on display through Oct. 25 at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia. Included in the exhibition are ceramics, drawings and mixed media work, much of which was created during a summer 2020 artist-in-residency at the center, with the support of a fellowship from the South Carolina Arts Commission. A livestreamed Q&A about the exhibition and the artist fellowship is planned for noon on Oct. 9. As the only art organization in South Carolina dedicated solely to the advancement of contemporary art, 701 CCA hosts year-round exhibitions of regional, national and international scope in its 2,500 square-foot gallery.