PERFORMING ARTS – Professor Becky Becker was presented with a Kennedy Center Gold Medallion Award on February 2. The award is presented annually by the eight Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival regions to honor individuals or organizations that have made extraordinary contributions to the teaching and producing of theatre and who have significantly dedicated their time, artistry and enthusiasm to the development of the festival.
PHILOSOPHY – Assistant Professor Pascal Brixel presented his paper “Incentives Compromise Autonomy: The Unfreedom of Extrinsically Motivated Activity” virtually at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association.
HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton was interviewed by the French daily newspaper, Liberation, in one of a series of articles marking one year since the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington D.C. The article focuses on the current wave of changing state electoral laws and redistricting taking place ahead of the 2022 elections. Burton and co-author Armand Derfner published an op-ed in the Washington Post discussing a recent Texas abortion Law, now reprinted in several other newspapers including the Denton Record-Chronicle. Burton and co-author Armand Derner discussed “Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court” in conversation with Deborah Kennedy Kennard at the Charleston Literary Society as part of their Speaker Series. As a member of the Board of editors of “Fides et Historia,” Burton was asked to write an essay about “How Covid-19 Has Changed My Writing,” which appeared in Vol. 53:2.
ART – Director of Lee Gallery and Senior Lecturer Denise Woodward-Detrich was selected to jury an Upstate exhibit, “26 Awards,” at Greenville Technical College. On display January 19 through February 25 at the Kroc Center, the awarded works were selected from the 2021 Visual Art Annual Student Exhibit.
ENGLISH – Assistant Professor of English and World Cinema Maziyar Faridi was invited to give a talk for the Persian Circle in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago. His presentation was titled “Awaiting Without Horizon: Notes on Messianic Readings of Modern Poetry and New Wave Cinema of Iran.”
ARCHITECTURE – Professor Anjali Joseph, Director of the Center for Health Facilities Design and Testing (CHFDT), recently served on a panel of global experts for “The Future Hospital: Surgery 2050” webinar. The webinar was organized by European Healthcare Design for their “Future Hospital 2050” innovation series on SALUS TV. Joseph and the other panelists discussed how innovation in system and service design, medical technology, and digital and physical infrastructure will define the future hospital. Some of the biggest changes are taking place in emergency and critical care as well as in surgery and the operating theatre.
ARCHITECTURE – Assistant Professor of Architecture Andreea Mihalache was invited to present at Vanier College, Montreal as part of the annual Humanities Symposium, which this year was virtual and focused on the topic of “Boredom.” She delivered a talk titled “An Encounter with Boredom in Seven Tableaux (and an Epilogue).”
PERFORMING ARTS –Assistant Professor Lisa Sain Odom, soprano, performed an art song by Richard Strauss, “Zuiegnung,” at the National Association of Teachers of Singing’s Winter Workshop on January 8 in New York as part of a German masterclass with clinician Nils Neubert of the Manhattan School of Music. She was also selected to perform three musical theatre numbers for Broadway performers and audience.
LANGUAGES – Professor and department chair Salvador Oropesa published the article “How to Study Contemporary Mexican Cinema: The Case of David William Foster,” in the November 2021 edition of “Chasqui.”
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE – Professor Mary G. Padua was invited to give a virtual talk on January 12 to the American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA) South Carolina chapter on her 2020 award-winning book, “Hybrid Modernity: the Public Park in late 20th century China” (Routledge 2020). Her talk is part of the ASLA’s local chapter education program, Virtual Site Tours + Talks, where landscape architects can learn about award-winning works while earning continuing education credits needed to sustain their professional licenses. Padua was also invited to serve on an international panel of educators to assess China’s State Council 2021 proposed revisions to their “official catalogue of disciplines and majors”. This includes subsuming landscape architecture (LA) under urban planning as a sub-discipline. This proposal is a major revision to the previous 2011 State Council catalogue that initially classified LA as a first-level discipline equivalent to architecture and urban planning – enabling China’s universities to deliver academic and professional master’s degrees, as well as doctoral degrees in landscape architecture.
REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT – Professor and director of the Master of Real Estate Development program, Dustin C. Read, received a best paper award from the American Real Estate Society for his research on senior housing presented at the organization’s 37th annual conference. The paper, titled “Resident Service Coordinators as an Underutilized Resource in the Design and Development of Affordable Housing,” was co-authored with Greg Galford and Jeff Robert, both scholars at Virginia Tech.
HISTORY –Professor Douglas Seefeldt and his collaborators from a number of institutions received one of the inaugural National Historical Publications and Records Commission/Mellon Planning Grants for Collaborative Digital Editions in African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American History and Ethnic Studies. Seefeldt and Archivist Tawa Ducheneaux from the Woksape Tipi Library & Archives at Oglala Lakota College, are the project co-directors for the two-year planning grant titled “Wičhóoyake kiη aglí—They Bring the Stories Back: Connecting Lakota Wild West Performers to Pine Ridge Community.” The proposed digital edition of primary sources (texts, images, oral histories, and artifacts) focuses on Lakota community members who traveled across Canada, the United States and Europe as performers with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and other Wild West shows during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project will demonstrate how unique and significant these performers’ experiences were to their families, to American culture and to European conceptions of Lakota people. Taken as a whole, the digitized items in this archival project will tell the important but little-known history of these Lakota performers from the perspectives of their own communities in a way that will both educate and inspire future generations.
HISTORY – Professor Michael Silvestri’s essay, “19 January 1922: The Dedication of the John Nicholson Statue, Lisburn,” was published on the “Century Ireland 1913-1923” website on the one-hundredth anniversary of the statue’s dedication. The Century Ireland project is an online historical newspaper, produced by Boston College and the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, that tells the story of the events of Irish life a century ago.
WORLD CINEMA – Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies Aga Skrodzka was invited to write for the special issue of “Studies in World Cinema,” which focuses on women. Her article, “Feminist Worlding and World Cinema: The Case of Małgorzata Szumowska,” proposes a new approach to theorizing World Cinema as an emancipatory practice. Skrodzka has also published a study on Walerian Borowczyk’s use of art as a sexploitation strategy. Titled “Walerian Borowczyk: Seventies Sexploitation through Sublimation,” the essay appears in the new edition of “Shocking Cinema of the 70s,” an anthology edited by the UK film scholars Julian Petley and Xavier Mendik (Bloomsbury Academic). This project is an outcome of Skrodzka’s collaboration with colleagues from the School of Media at Birmingham City University and Cine-Excess.
LANGUAGES – Associate Professor Gabriela Stoicea has published and co-edited with Carl Niekerk (Professor of German, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) the 2021 volume of the Lessing Yearbook, which focuses on the eighteenth century’s understanding of catastrophe and catastrophic events. Also, her monograph “Fictions of Legibility: The Human Face and Body in Modern German Novels from Sophie von La Roche to Alfred Döblin” (Transcript, 2020) has recently been reviewed in “The German Quarterly,” “Studies in the Novel” and in “Focus on German Studies.”
ART – Associate Professor Kathleen Thum exhibited drawings from her “Carbon Series” in the “13th Annual International Juried Exhibition Drawing Discourse” at University of North Carolina Asheville from January 14 through February 11 and in the “Int’l Paperworks 2022” at the Northwest Arts Center at Minot State University in North Dakota from January 13 through February 24.
LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya presented a paper entitled “The virtues of Close Reading: Ethical, Social, and Theoretical Approaches to Mallarmé’s ‘Salut’: A Method Armistice, and the Problem of Method” at the Modern Language Association of America Conference in Washington DC. He also published an article entitled “‘Souvenir d’horizons, qu’est-ce, ô toi, que la Terre?’: Écopoétique chez Bonnefoy et Mallarmé: lieu, sens, présence” in Parler la Terre/Speaking the Earth, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies.