Catching up with CAAH Faculty – May 2015

May 4, 2015

The Clemson Colloquium on Race & Ethnicity (CCRE), together with this year’s Race and the University Initiative, hosted a two-day spring conference at Clemson that featured presentations and roundtable discus­sions across a wide range of intellectual work and teaching on race and ethnicity at Clemson and at universities in the region. The conference featured a keynote address by Salamishah Tillet (U Penn), pedagogy roundtable speaker Lupe Davidson (U of Oklahoma), and faculty from nearby universities.

Cameron Bushnell, Angela Naimou, Kimberly Manganelli, and Erin Goss comprised the organizing committee. CAAH Clemson faculty presenters included: Lee Wilson (history), Susanna Ashton (English), George Palacios (languages), Amit Bein (history), Tiffany Dawn Creegan Miller (languages), Garry Bertholf (English), Adrian Paterson (English, visiting professor from the National University of Ireland, Galway), Cameron Bushnell (English), Lindsay Thomas (English), Daphne Tatiana Canlas (Ph.D. Candidate, RCID), and Chenjerai Kumanyika (communication studies).

This Spring’s CCRE conference was co-sponsored by CAAH’s Race and the University initiative, The Rutland Institute for Ethics, the Women’s Leadership program, Pan African Studies, Pearce Center for Professional Communication, Calhoun Honors College, the Department of English, the Graduate Student Senate and the Department of Communication Studies.

CCRE is a working group of Clemson faculty that seeks to reshape intellectual perspectives on race and ethnicity and works to acknowledge and counter discrimination on Clemson’s campus and beyond. It is open to all Clemson faculty interested in the study of race and ethnicity.

Susanna Ashton, professor of English, has just been awarded a semester-long research fellowship at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. She will take up residency there for Fall 2015 to work on her book, A Plausible Man: The Life of John Andrew Jackson.

Vernon Burton will be inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in April 2016. Burton joins Dorothy Allison, Betsy Byars and Guy Davenport as the academy’s newest inductees. The South Carolina Academy of Authors was founded at Anderson University in 1986. Its principal purpose is to identify and recognize the state’s distinguished writers. The Academy board selects new inductees annually whose works have been judged culturally important. Each inductee, whether living or deceased, has added to South Carolina’s literary legacy by earning notable scholarly attention or achieving historical prominence. Burton is professor of history and director of the Clemson Cyberinstitute and is the author or editor of more than 20 books and more than 200 articles.

Cameron Bushnell presented a paper at the American Comparative Literature Association in Seattle in March. Her essay was entitled: “Modeling Canon Formation: Postcolonial Writing about Art” and was part of a panel on Creating Contemporary Canons. Bushnell is associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English.

Wayne Chapman shares the following panel, lecture and upcoming paper. Chapman is professor of English and director of the Clemson University Press.

• Chaired panel: “Irish Authors presented by The South Carolina Review”; and sponsored poets C. L. Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe, Clemson Literary Festival 8, Clemson University, March 27, 2015.
• Invited lecture: “Yeats, Landor, and “The Phases of the Moon” (illustrated), Atlanta Modernisms Seminar, The Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory University, March 23. 2015.
• “Dorothy Wellesley and Virginia Woolf: ‘praise from Yeats is the only solid thing of its kind now existing,’” at the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Bloomsburg University, Bloomsburg, PA, June 4-7, 2015.

Peter Cohen, senior lecturer of religion, was inducted into the Martin Luther King, Jr. International College of Ministers and Laity in the Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College during their Crown Forum Ceremony in April.  The following day he presented a paper at the 2015 Peace Builders Conference, ‘Fostering Dialogues in Education, Ethics and Nonviolent Peace Building: Global, Social and Religious Movements Today’. The paper is titled ‘Gandhi’s Satyagraha: A Paradigm for Religious Dialogue Leading to Peace’ and will be published in a volume along with the other papers delivered at the conference.

Bryan Denham, Campbell Professor of Sports Communication, recently contributed a chapter on performance-enhancing drug use in professional baseball to the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Drugs and Sport.

The unique sculpture of David Detrich is on display alongside works from Yoko Ono, Lynda Benglis and Leonardo Drew in “Material World” at the Greenville County Museum of Art. Detrich was also invited recently to exhibit his work at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. Earlier this spring, his work was  included in a group show in Los Angeles entitled “Scripted Spaces.” Detrich is professor of art and coordinator of the graduate and sculpture programs in the Department of Art.

Ufuk Ersoy’s essay, Glass, as Light as Air, as Deep as Water,”  has been published as a chapter of The Material Imagination, Reveries on Architecture and Matter, ed. by M. Mindrup. Ersoy is assistant professor in the School of Architecture. Ersoy joined Clemson’s faculty in 2012. He teaches history, theory and design.

David Franco presented a paper at the multidisciplonary conference “The Mediated City” in Los Angeles last fall. Franco is assistant professor in the School of Architecture. He teaches design studio and courses on history, theory and criticism.

Cindy Gooodloe, lecturer of music (piano), presented a lecture and recital with audiovisuals for The Music Club of Greenville, S.C..  Through performance examples, plus pictures and audio, the recital explored bird depiction through history in keyboard music, how it is reflected from the Baroque thru the Contemporary periods. The recital was held at the home of Beth Lee in Greenville, with a reception afterwards.

H. Roger Grant has a new book chapter: “Trains of the 1970’s: Crisis, Response, Rebirth,” in Robert S. McGonigal, ed., Trains of the 1970’s: Crisis and Rebirth for America’s Railroads (Kalmbach Publishing Co., 2015). Grant is the Kathryn and Calhoun Lemon Professor of History at Clemson University.

This past November, Keith Evan Green (architecture) was an invited speaker at the Critical and Clinical Cartographies Conference hosted by the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. Other speakers included N. Katherine Hayles (Duke), Antoine Picon (Harvard), Christian Girard (Paris) and Kas Oosterhuis (TU Delft/Rotterdam). From wide-ranging perspectives, the conference explored the relationship between the human body as an organism and the machines employed in health care. Inspired by the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari, the organizers invited participants to engage “in the practice of cartography in order to map the ever-shifting thresholds between the organic and the inorgan­ic, the innate and the acquired.” Green’s paper, “The ART of Vortical Thinking,” considers his design research project, the interactive and intelligent Assistive Robotic Table, as free-flowing and measureless. An edited book will be released with the collected conference papers. At the time of the conference, Green was visiting professor at TU Delft on research sabbatical. Green had turned down the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Canada (Montreal) for his temporary Dutch home. In between local travels and engagement with theTU Delft community, Green completed the manuscript for his monograph, Architectural Robotics: Ecosystems of Bits, Bytes and Biology (MIT Press, February 2016).

Steven Grosby’s article “Myth and symbol: the persistence of ethnicity and religion” appeared in the journal Nations and Nationalism 21/1 (2015): 182-186; and the chapter “Methodological individualism and invisible hands,” appeared in the edited book Commerce and Community: Ecologies of social cooperation (Routledge, 2015), pp. 122-145. Grosby was also appointed to the international editorial board of the journal Annuaire Roumain d’Anthropologie, a publication of the Romanian Academy. Grosby is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion.

Sallie Hambright-Belue, assistant professor of architecture, along with her Clemson Creative Inquiry students, presented “Curriculum as Media: Shaping Beginning Design Students,” at the 31^st National Conference on the Beginning Design Conference. During this three day forum in February at the University of Houston, faculty from across the nation presented their work in different categories. The Clemson group, under Hambright-Belue’s guidance, shared an indepth analysis of the Clemson University architecture curriculum. Their presentation sparked interest and discussion among the audience from universities across the country, about how to further improve architectural education.

In February, Lance Howard and a group of Clemson Creative Inquiry students presented  “Bringing Other Clemsons to Light,” at the 9th annual Landscape, Space and Place Conference at Indiana University in Bloomington. While there, Howard and his group demonstrated the method for making bricks by hand, using the same techniques used by convict laborers to construct the early buildings of Clemson University. The bricks made in Bloomington (from Clemson clay) will be used in the construction of a labyrinth dedicated to a loving relationship between humans and the land somewhere on the Clemson campus. Howard is senior lecturer of geography.

Steven B. Katz, Pearce Professor for Professional Communication, shares the following news:

•  In November his talk at the National Communication Association in Chicago on the USDA’s AC21 document and process on biotechnology and ‘agricultural harmony’ was delivered on his behalf.
• In March, he organized, chaired, and introduced by playing an electric guitar, a panel on rhetoric and music that featured three RCID doctoral students studying rhetoric and music (Mike Utley, punk rock; Mathew Osborn, electronic dub step; and A.D. Carson, hip-hop) at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in Tampa, Florida; this session was streamed live, and took Twitter questions and comments.
• In May, he will speak to the University of Buffalo campus on Writing in the Disciplines.
• At Clemson University, he organized and presented with Professor Lesly Temesvari (biological sciences) four workshops for the Writing in the Disciplines Initiative he created. The workshops involved about 200 faculty members from across campus.
• In the 2014-2015 academic year, Katz also had three articles and eight poems published, with more to come.
• He has been appointed as the poetry editor of Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine.
• Some of Katz’s poems can be seen at
  http://egjournal.org/article/conversions-in-the-blue-ridge-mountains/
  http://egjournal.org/article/left-earth/  
  http://egjournal.org/issue/spring-2014/article/digging-stairs/
  http://egjournal.org/issue/spring-2014/article/four-meditative-sonnets-sound-voice-paper-breath/
  and http://repository.stcloudstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=survive_thrive.

Thomas Kuehn’s chapter “Gender and Law in Milan,” was published in A Companion to Late Medieval and Early Modern Milan: The
Distinctive Features of an Italian State, ed. Andrea Gamberini, Brill’s Companions to European History vol. 7 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015), 406-31. Kuehn is professor and chair of the Department of History.

Eric Lapin presented a paper, “Performing Arts: Rethinking Higher Education Music Programs,” and chaired the session on “Pedagogical Innovations in Teaching Training and Music Programs” at the Humanities Education and Research Association (HERA) conference in San Francisco, CA. Lapin is lecturer of music in the Department of Performing Arts.

Michael LeMahieu recently published a review essay, co-authored with Vernon Burton, in American Studies, and another in Twentieth-Century Literature. This spring he has given talks at the Modern Language Association convention, Penn State University, and Yale University, where he is currently a visiting faculty fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.

Dominic Mastroianni, assistant professor in the Department of English, was  named the Clemson Libraries Researcher of the Month for April. In the announcement, Clemson Libraries stated, “Mastroianni joined the Clemson faculty in 2008 and has kept busy teaching and publishing since then. He has published several articles, reviews, interviews and a book. The Melville Society awarded his 2011 article “Revolutionary Time and the Future of Democracy in Melville’s Pierre” the 2012 Hennig Cohen Prize for ‘excellence in scholarship and writing in an article or book chapter on Melville.'” Read more here.

Joseph P. Mazer, assistant professor and associate chair of communication studies and director of the CAAH Social Media Listening Center, shares the following news:

• Joseph P. Mazer and Elizabeth E. Graham (The University of Akron) published “Measurement in Instructional Communication Research: A Decade in Review in the latest volume of Communication Education.
• Mazer, Blair Thompson (Western Kentucky University), and Elizabeth Flood Grady (University of Nebraska) published “The Changing Nature of Parent-Teacher Communication: Mode Selection in the Smartphone Era in the same volume. That paper received the 2015 Top Paper Award from the Central States Communication Association’s Communication Education Interest Group.
• Mazer and Andrew M. Ledbetter (Texas Christian University) published “A Place for Connecting and Disclosing: Facebook and Friendships at the Dawn of College Life” in the second edition of Casing Interpersonal Communication: Case Studies in Personal and Social Relationships.
• In November, Mazer assumed the role of chair of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) Instructional Development Division.
• In January 2015, he was named consulting editor for forums for Communication Education, a journal published by NCA.
• The Social Media Listening Center received a Grand Award (Writing for the Media category) from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for Clemson’s “We CU Chatter” feature.

In January, Kathleen Nalley’s second poetry collection, American Sycamore, was published by Finishing Line Press. In February, Emrys in Greenville hosted Nalley (poetry) and Jonathan O’Dell (fiction) for a reading at Gringos in downtown Greenville as part of the Emrys Reading Room series.  May 15-17, Nalley has been invited to be one of the featured authors at the S.C. Book Festival in Columbia. She will be with S.C. Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth and S.C. poet Ray McManus in a session called “A Punch of Poetry.” Nalley is a lecturer in the Department of English.

In March, at the annual conference of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, Hala Nassar was elected second vice president of the organization. On Earth Day, April 22, Nassar delivered the keynote address at the first-ever Water Symposium at Penn State, “Water, Place and People: Historical and Cultural Challenges in Urban Landscape Design Along the Nile.” Nassar is associate professor and graduate coordinator of landscape architecture.

Travers Scott has a new publication: “Productive Passions: Masculinity, Reproduction and Territorializations in Techno-horror,” for a special issue on “Geophilosophies of Masculinity” in Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 20:1, 87-104, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2015.1017384. Scott is assistant professor of communication studies and director of the graduate program in communication, technology and society.

Kerrie Seymour performed in Richard III as Queen Elizabeth at Greenville’s Warehouse Theatre during April and May. With this production, Seymour earned her membership in Actors Equity Association, the union representing professional actors and stage managers. In June, she will perform as Ellen in Two Rooms by Lee Blessing as part of Centre Stage’s Fringe Series. Seymour is an assistant professor of theatre.

Greg Shelnutt was appointed in January to serve on the professional practices committee of the College Art Association board. He will serve a three-year term. Shelnutt is professor of art and chair of the Department of Art.

Aga Skrodzka has a new book chapter: “Cinematic Fairy Tales of Female Mobility in Post-Wall Europe: Hanna v. Mona” in East, West and Centre: Reframing Post-1989 European Cinema, eds. Michael Gott and Todd Herzog. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. In March, Skrodzka  attended the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Montreal where she delivered a paper titled “Mediating the Warsaw Uprising: Polish National Memory in Recent Popular Media.” She also attended a workshop focused on the “World Cinema” turn in film studies, where she was pleased to announce Clemson University’s launch of its new B.A. program in World Cinema, the first such program in the nation. Skrodzka is associate professor of film and media studies in Department of English and director of Clemson University’s new B.A. in world cinema.

Graciela Tissera, associate professor of Spanish and director of Clemson’s language and international health program, recently presented two papers:

• “We Greeks are the Chosen: The Golden Era of Courage and Glory in Alexander the Great by Robert Rossen (1956).” The 2014 Film & History Conference. Golden Ages: Styles & Personalities, Genres & Histories. Madison, Wisconsin, October 29-November 2, 2014.
• “Filmic Portrayals of the Subconscious Mind and the Game of Death.” Southeast Coastal Conference on Languages and Literatures. Georgia Southern University. Savannah, Georgia, March 26-27, 2015.

Melinda Weathers has a new paper out: Weathers, M. R., & Hopson, M. (2015). “I define what hurts me”: A co-cultural theoretical analysis of communication factors related to digital dating abuse. Howard Journal of Communications, 26, 95-113. Weathers is assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Communication Studies.

Valerie Zimany, assistant professor of art, shares the following news:

• Her ceramic sculpture, “The Tinker,” was exhibited at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa in Utatsu no Katachi: 25 Years of the Utatsuyama Craft Workshop.
• She was also featured in All About Porcelain, a juried national exhibition at the Clay Studio of Missoula, MT.
• Upcoming exhibitions this spring include the National Museum of Slovenia’s  International Ceramic Triennial UNICUM – 2015, a juried international competition, as well as DRAWN IN, invitational group exhibition at Calvin-Morris Gallery, Chelsea, NY, organized by Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts.
• Valerie recently traveled to the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference, where she was a presenter on the NCECA Connections Panel “On the Tenure Track.”
• Valerie’s collaborative installation “Evergreen: Vespiary” at UNC-Charlotte in fall was documented in video by UNCC Media and can be viewed here.
• Valerie  was named as one of the 2016-2018 Creativity Professors by Dean Goodstein at the CAAH Honors and Awards Ceremony on April 10, 2015.