COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE, ARTS AND HUMANITIES – Dean Richard E. Goodstein recently announced faculty promotions and tenure. Robert Hewitt, a specialist in landscape architecture, achieved the rank of professor in the School of Architecture. Also in architecture, Joseph Choma, Sallie Hambright-Belue and Amalia Leifeste were named associate professors. New associate professors also include Todd Anderson (art); Joe Burgett and Jason Lucas (construction science and management); Walt Hunter (English) and Raquel Anido (languages/Spanish). The following faculty members were promoted to senior lecturers: Clarissa Mendez and George Schafer (architecture); Katalin Beck, Lucian Ghita, Andrew Mathas and Kathleen Nalley (English); and Harris King (languages/German). Congratulations to all!
HISTORY – Rod Andrew was interviewed in a USA Today special section commemorating the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Andrew discussed how he connects today’s students to the realities of D-Day through a study-abroad trip where they stand on the same ground and research individual Clemson soldiers lost there. The publication also featured a photograph from one of his past trips.
PERFORMING ARTS – Anthony Bernarducci published two new choral works with GIA Publications titled “My Heart Be Brave” and “The Awakening.” Both compositions utilize the poetry of James Weldon Johnson. A recording for the “My Heart Be Brave” is available at the GIA website, https://www.giamusic.com/store/resource/my-heart-be-brave-print-g9830.
HISTORY – Vernon Burton spoke on May 3 about “Historians in the Courtroom: Voting Rights, and the Long Reconstruction in an Age of Alternative Facts” in the Russell Senate Office Building. The occasion was the 2019 United States Capitol Historical Society Symposium titled “Reconstruction and the Long Reconstruction: 150 Years toward Freedom.” C-SPAN3 broadcast his presentation on June 2 and has posted it online: https://www.c-span.org/video/?460393-3/voting-rights-historians-courtroom. On May 13-14, Burton brought six students from the Clemson University Creative Inquiry Veterans Project to Washington where they toured the Pentagon and met with Congressional and Senate officers from South Carolina. Burton and the students were recognized at a Clemson Corps alumni gathering on May 14 at the Library of Congress, where they presented nearly 50 video interviews of U.S. service veterans, mostly from WWII, to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. The Library of Congress is using the Clemson Creative Inquiry project, which has submitted more than 150 interviews thus far, as a model for other universities to follow.
PERFORMING ARTS – Professor Emeritus John H. Butler and the late Bruce F. Cook were honored May 17 at the dedication of a new pictorial sign at Tiger Band Plaza. Both were former directors of the band. Cook’s widow, Pat, and children Tim and Michelle were in attendance, along with Butler.
ENGLISH – Gregory Luke Chwala published “Ruins of Empire: Decolonial Queer Ecologies in Cliff’s ‘No Telephone to Heaven’” in the “Tropical Gothic” special issue of the eTropic journal, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2019). “Ruins of Empire” examines the ways in which Michelle Cliff’s 1987 novel “No Telephone to Heaven” uses postcolonial Gothic conventions to articulate a convergence of gender, race, sexuality, capitalism, colonialism, and environment.
ART – David Detrich had two artworks featured at the Con-Temporary Art Observatorium in Lavagna, Italy. The curated “Egocracy” exhibition, which ran from May 9-26, displayed work from around the world by artists who explored “the meanderings of egocentricity, of selfreferentialism and the presenteeism that permeate, rule and characterize the contemporary society… from the elitist mind, to the mass gratification in social networks.”
PERFORMING ARTS – On May 23, Performance Today on American Public Media broadcast the Brahms Clarinet Sonata No. 1 performed by clarinetist Julian Bliss and pianist Bradley Moore on Jan. 19, 2017 at the Brooks Center as part of the Utsey Chamber Music Series. On May 31, the radio program broadcast another Utsey Series performance, the Aram Khachaturian Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano performed Sept. 12, 2016 by clarinetist Stas Chernyshev, pianist Eliran Avni and violinist Brendan Speltz. The series was established by Lillian “Mickey” Harder and her husband, Byron, in memory of her parents.
ENGLISH – Tharon Howard was invited to give presentations about website usability, user experience, and content strategy at four universities in China. Howard spoke at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Xi’an International Studies University, Shanghai Dianji University and Southeast University in Nanjing.
LANGUAGES – Jason Hurdich was featured in a recent South Carolina Public Radio story about monthly “Signing Starbucks” nights he co-founded with fellow Clemson ASL instructor Bo Clements. The monthly social events at the shop’s Laurens Road location in Greenville have become popular with members of the Deaf community, drawing as many as 300 people.
HISTORY – Thomas Kuehn was an invited participant at an exploratory seminar titled “Speaking of Foundlings: Contexts of Care at the Ospedale degli Innocenti” from May 9-10 at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti outside Florence, Italy. His presentation was “Illegitimacy, Legitimacy, and Paternal Power of the Innocenti: Ambiguities of the Legal Status of Foundlings.” Kuehn published “Travails of the Widow in Law in Florence at the End of the Fifteenth Century: An Illustrative Case” in Sixteenth Century Journal 49, pp. 691-711.
PERFORMING ARTS – Linda Li-Bleuel performed recitals and gave lectures during May and June at Nanjing University and Xi’an University of Arts and Sciences in China.
LANGUAGES – Tiffany Creegan Miller presented at the annual Congress hosted by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) held from May 24-27 in Boston, Massachusetts. Her presentation was titled “Kaqchikel Ajq’ij and Poet Calixta Gabriel Xiquín’s Gendered (Re-)Mappings of the Four Cardinal Points and the Sioux White Buffalo Calf Woman.”
ENGLISH – Amy Monaghan was invited to serve as one of three jurors awarding the narrative feature Grand Jury Prize at the 17th annual Independent Film Festival Boston held from April 24 to May 1.
ARCHITECTURE – Winifred Elysse Newman was invited to serve as a juror for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) 19th Annual Steel Design Student Competition, administered by the ACSA and sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). Winners announced this summer.
LANGUAGES – Salvador Oropesa published “Twenty-First Century Noir: From Stieg Larsson’s Trilogy to Dolores Redondo’s and Eva García Sáenz de Urturi’s Trilogies” in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 42, pp. 114-27. Oropesa also read the paper “‘Mar de Plástico’ (2015-16): Duelo de Legitimaciones Étnicas en un Western Constitucional” on May 7 at the conference XV Congreso de Novela y Cine Negro: Clásicos y Contemporáneos, Universidad de Salamanca.
LANGUAGES – Kelly Peebles was selected to participate in a pedagogy seminar, “Enseigner le Français Medical” (Teaching French for Health), sponsored by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. The seminar from May 20-24 was hosted by the France-Florida Research Institute at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and was taught by François Renaud, responsable pédagogique with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Paris Île-de-France. Only 17 faculty members were selected to participate, hailing from U.S. institutions including Clemson, Cornell, Rutgers, Baylor, and the Universities of Kentucky, Florida, Arkansas, and Arizona, among others.
LANGUAGES – Jae Takeuchi presented on her new research project at the 25th Princeton Japanese Pedagogy Forum, held May 11-12 at Princeton University. The title of her presentation was “Keigo Ideologies Revisited: JFL Teachers’ Beliefs and L2 Speaker Legitimacy.”
ENGLISH – Rhondda Robinson Thomas made a presentation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art about her “Black Clemson” traveling museum exhibition project at the spring convening of incoming and outgoing Whiting Foundation fellows from May 23-24 in New York City. Thomas received a Whiting public engagement award last summer to support research conducted for her project during this past academic year.
ENGLISH – Jillian Weise co-edited (along with Khadijah Queen and Peter Catapano) a selection of poetry titled “Make No Apologies for Yourself,” which appeared May 19 in the online edition of The New York Times. Weise released a video interview of her character Tipsy Tullivan interviewing the writer Ishmael Reed. In “Ishmael Reed vs. Hamilton,” they discuss historians Michelle DuRoss, Lyra Monteiro, Nancy Isenberg and Ron Chernow. They also discuss the poets Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin.
PERFORMING ARTS – Bruce Whisler published an article on new microphone designs from Austrian Audio in the audio trade publication Tape Op. He also served as recording technical coordinator and mastering engineer for the CD “The Thirty-Four Orchestral Etudes of Vassily Brandt” published by the International Trumpet Guild.