ARCHITECTURE – During the spring of 2023, Associate Professor Vincent Blouin lead a Creative Inquiry team comprised of seven undergraduate students. Together, they embarked on a project titled “Smart and Healthy Buildings.” As part of their endeavor, the students successfully designed and created an autonomous robot intended to monitor long-term environmental data and collect user feedback in Lee III. The first round of trials has been scheduled for November 2023. Blouin is also guest editor of a publication called “Sustainable Building Design: Challenges and Opportunities”. This special issue belongs to the section “Green Sustainable Science and Technology” of the journal Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). To learn more and to make submissions, click here. The submission deadline is October 20, 2023.
ENGLISH – Lecturer Peter Cullen Bryan was re-elected for a second three-year term to the Governing Board of the Popular Culture Association, where he will lead the Elections Committee and the 2024 Chicago Conference Planning Committee. Additionally, he was appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of American Culture, where he will be serving as the special issue editor for a forthcoming volume on 100 years of Disney.
HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton responded to a plenary session on his co-authored book, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles on April 1. On April 19, he spoke on the meaning of Lincoln’s assassination at the University of Illinois, and on April 20-23, he keynoted and participated in a symposium in Indianapolis on “Liberty and Responsibility in the African American Religious Tradition.” On April 26, an essay titled “Tyre Nichols, George Floyd, Police Abuse, and the Need to Redefine ‘Qualified Immunity’” by Burton and Armand Derfner appeared in the Washington Monthly. On April 28-29, he spoke on voting rights as part of the Clifford and Virginia Durr Lecture in Montgomery, Alabama at the “Exploring the Arc of Justice” discussion organized by U.S. Circuit Judge J. Michelle Childs.
LANGUAGES – American Sign Language Assistant Professor Jody Cripps and five of his Creative Inquiry students, Allison Rambo, Brie Moose, Stacy Lawrence, Cassie Fisher, and Tariq Copeland travelled to Martha’s Vineyard April 9-15 to do outreach for reviving signed language on the island as well as to do research on deaf genealogy on the Lambert and West families. You can read more about the project on the Department of Language’s blog. Also, Cripps and his colleague, Leyla Craig, a Ph.D. candidate from University of Sydney, gave a presentation titled Emergency Preparedness with People Who Sign to Pikesville Volunteer Fire Company on April 27.
HISTORY – Professor H. Roger Grant is the author of a book chapter, “Railroads in the Urban Trans-Chicago West, 1865-1925” in The City and the Railway in the World from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, edited by Ralf Roth and Paul Van Heesvelde and published in London by Routledge.
PERFORMING ARTS – Brooks Center Director Emerita Lillian Utsey Harder, artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured a broadcast of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18 performed by the Verona String Quartet at their Brooks Center concert on November 1, 2022. The March 15 broadcast reached an estimated 260,000 listeners. On April 11, the performance of Debussy’s Premiere Rhapsody by clarinetist David Shifrin and pianist Anna Polonsky was broadcast from their concert on April 4, 2019.
ARCHITECTURE — Professors Anjali Joseph and David Allison, both with the Center for Health Facilities Design and Testing, coauthored an article published in the Health Environments Research & Design Journal titled, “Designing for Family Engagement in Neonatal ICUs: How Is the Interior Design of Single-Family Rooms Supporting Family Behaviors, From Passive to Active?” The study identified three behavioral patterns and five themes demonstrating how Single-Family Rooms’ private bathrooms, family storage, family zone partitions, positive distractions, and information boards can support families’ home-like, educational, collaborative, and infant care behaviors.
PERFORMING ARTS – Professor Linda Li-Bleuel coordinated and chose repertoire for a celebration concert on April 6, “A Pathway to Steinway,” which featured performances from Kaye Stanzione, Linda Li-Bleuel, Lillian Harder, and piano, vocal, and instrumental students. The concert was a celebration of a gift from Kaye and Bob Stanzione for the purchase of enough Steinway pianos to put the Department of Performing Arts on track to earning the “All-Steinway School” designation. Clemson Univeristy First Lady Beth Clements introduced the concert, and Dean Nicholas Vazsonyi and Steinway CEO Mark Love gave remarks. President Clements was also in attendance.
LANGUAGES – Assistant professor Magdaléna Matušková led six students from a medical interpreting course (SPAN 4990) as they participated as interpreters during Prisma Health Simulation Center exercises on March 30-31. Through their involvement in these exercises, they helped train medical and nursing students in how to work with interpreters. The students not only expanded their professional networks but also gained an insight into their future careers. They also helped to change some preconceived notions about working with non-English speaking patients and the healthcare interpreting profession in general.
ARCHITECTURE – Anastasia Maurina, a doctoral student in Planning, Development and the Built Environement working with Associate Professor Vincent Blouin, presented a research paper titled “Parametric Study and Multi-Objective Optimization of Deployable Scissor-Like Bamboo Arch Structures” at the ARCC 2023 International Conference in Dallas. This paper is part of the research on the development of design guidelines for deployable bamboo structures to be applied in post-disaster reconstruction, particularly in developing countries.
ENGLISH – Lecturer Chelsea McKelvey will be part of an NEH Summer Institute at Arizona State called “Our SHARED Future: Science, Humanities, Arts, Research Ethics, and Deliberation.” This four-week residential institute focuses on building relations and connections between general education humanities courses and STEM students.
ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Clare Mullaney published a review of John Lee Clark’s poetry collection, How to Communicate in Public Books. She also published an essay entitled “Accessibility and Teaching Book History” in the new volume, Teaching Book History (University of Massachusetts Press).
PERFORMING ARTS – Assistant Professor Lisa Sain Odom sang the soprano solos in the Beethoven Mass in C with the Clemson University Singers and orchestra at the Brooks Center on April 27. She also wrote an article, “Teaching Group Voice Lessons”which was published in the May/June edition of the Classical Singer bi-monthly print. She also gave a solo vocal performance in concert as part of the release of Hymns@First: Testimonies of Grace, an album of vocal solo hymn performances on which she was featured.
LANGUAGES – Professor and Chair Salvador Oropesa read the paper “Realismo, prostitución y adulterio en la serie Bevilacqua de Lorenzo Silva” at the XIX Congreso de novela y cine negro: Todos los Colores del Género Negro, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain, on May 4.
LANGUAGES – Professor Johannes Schmidt published an article that appeared in The Post and Courier on the Holocaust witness Peter Becker, a Professor of History at University of South Carolina.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE – Professor Thomas Schurch received an honor award in the annual awards competition from the American Society of Landscape Architects, South Carolina Chapter in the “Analysis and Planning” category. His work comprised a 70-page study titled “A Best Practices Primer: Accommodating Growth in Pendleton and the Upstate – A Resource Guide for Planning Commissions.”
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Associate Professor Charles Starkey presented “The Disunity of Courage” at the 114th Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in Louisville, KY and at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting in San Francisco. He also co-authored a paper, “Value of Goal Predicts Accolade Courage: More Evidence that Courage is Taking a Worthwhile Risk” with Cynthia Pury (Psychology) and Laura Olson (Political Science) that has appeared online in the Journal of Positive Psychology.