INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES – Associate Professor Todd Anderson’s printed artwork “Swiftcurrent Glacier, The Last Glacier” and the original woodblock he carved in its making were both recently acquired by the Hockaday Museum of Art in Kalispell, Montana, for their permanent collection. “It is an honor to have my artwork placed in context and conversation with historic art luminaries, including Russell Chatham and Lucille Van Slick and contemporary peers like Ian van Coller and Bruce Crownover,” Anderson said.
HISTORY – Assistant Professor Camden Burd published his first book, The Roots of Flower City: Horticulture, Empire, and the Remaking of Rochester, New York (Cornell University Press). The book historicizes how a small group of entrepreneurs adapted their businesses to the nineteenth-century American imperial project by distributing plant material to settler-colonists across North America. Furthermore, Burd discusses how the capital from that enterprise flowed back to Rochester, New York transforming the antebellum boomtown into a horticultural wonderland by the late nineteenth century.
HISTORY – On Sept. 20, Professor Vernon Burton participated in a question and answer session with Bob Elder of Baylor University, who delivered a lecture at Clemson on the life of John C. Calhoun. Introducing Burton, Clemson University Historian Otis Pickett announced that this would become an annual lecture series officially named the “Dr. Orville Vernon Burton Annual Lecture Series on The U.S. South.” On Sept 25, Burton and Professor J. Brent Morris spoke to the Confederation of South Carolina Local Historical Societies at the state archives in Columbia. On Oct. 12, Burton chaired a session on Presbyterians at the Faith and History Conference in Birmingham and that evening gave a keynote on South Carolina’s Political History in Laurens, SC.
ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards’s poem, “On Gluttony” was published last month in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. It is a love poem that features cannibalism.
LANGUAGES – Associate Professor Stephen Fitzmaurice published an Open Education Resource (OER) chapter, titled “Importance of Fingerspelling in Educational Settings”in the co-edited A Survey of American Sign Language/English Interpreting Settings. Along with Jessica Bentley-Sassaman of Bloomsburg University, Fitzmaurice also published an article in the International Journal of Interpreter Education, 15(1) titled “Perceptions of non-deaf parties in a student interpreted transaction.”
PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured six broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: pianist Maxim Lando’s broadcast on September 17 of Improvisation on Duke Ellington from his concert on September 15, 2022, and an additional broadcast on September 30 of Nikolai Kapustin’s Variations, Op. 4; guitarist Jason Vieaux’s broadcast on September 20 of his arrangement of Agustin Barrios’ Waltz in G Major, Op. 8, No. 3 from his concert on September 14, 2021; Verona Quartet and pianist David Fung’s broadcast on September 24 of their performance of Grazyna Bacewicz’s Piano Quintet No. 1 (movt. 1) and Duke Ellington’s Cotton Club Stomp from their concert on November 1, 2022; Sphinx Virtuosi’s broadcast on September 27 of Jessie Montgomery’s Strum from their concert on March 30, 2023; broadcast on October 11, 2024 of Howard Ferguson’s Octet for Winds and Strings by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center from their concert on October 18, 2021.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Professor Charlie Kurth traveled to Helsinki, Finland to launch the Negative Emotion Research Group (NERG), an international group of emotion researchers. Participants spanned six disciplines across the humanities and social sciences—Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Theology, Literature, and Psychology. The launch events included a two-day manuscript workshop, a roundtable discussion on the future of interdisciplinary emotion research, and a series of networking events that allowed junior researchers to engage with more senior scholars. The events were funded through a 14,500€ Catalyst Grant from the Helsinki Institute for the Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Helsinki for which Kurth was the PI.
INTERDISCIPLINARY – Professor and Chair Lisa Melançon co-authored “Creating assignments that put programmatic inclusion and diversity work into practice” in Inclusive STEM: Transforming Disciplinary Writing Instruction for a Socially Just Future (pp. 123-145). The chapter asked the question: what happens in a large technical and professional communication writing program when it creates a programmatic inclusion vision and then sets out to enact it within an assignment? The chapter describes an evaluation of an assignment and the student work produced in relation to both student learning outcomes and the connection to programmatic inclusion. The chapter offers a discussion of what worked well for this assignment and what could be improved to facilitate better implementation of student learning and programmatic inclusion.
LANGUAGES – Professor Salvador Oropesa published the book chapter. “María Oruña’s El bosque de los cuatro vientos: The Architecture of Literary Genres.” Edited by Inmaculada Pertusa-Seva and Melissa A. Stewart in New Directions in Spanish Female Detective Fiction, Cambridge Scholars, 2024. (pp. 115-30).
LANGUAGES – Together with co-editor Liisa Steinby of the University of Turku, Professor Johannes Schmidt published “Forms of Temporality and Historical Time in the Work of Johann Gottfried Herder.” He co-authored the Introduction and the Afterword and single-authored the chapter “Herder: Time, Temporality, and (Christian) Telos.” The edited volume was published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Associate Professor Charles Starkey and Professor Cynthia Pury (Psychology) presented “The Disunity of Courage” at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum in October at Clemson.
LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya read his paper, “Baudelaire’s Expression of Life: Poetics and Politics of Production in Modernity” at the Semicentennial Colloquium of Nineteenth-Century French Studies, “Producing and Receiving the Nineteenth Century” at Duke University. He also read “AI’s Ethical Challenges in Literary Studies: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Democratic Responsibility”, Nurturing Democratic Responsibility in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the 25th Annual Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum at Clemson University. He also published article, “’Plus jamais la guerre !’ Claudel diplomate: 1927-1947. Prolongements dans les Suppléments aux Œuvres complètes” in Bulletin de la Société Paul Claudel, Vol. 242. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024, (pp. 15-25).
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – On September 21st, Associate Professor and Chair Ben White gave a talk entitled “Fuzzy Math: The Challenge of Counting Paul’s Authentic Letters” for the New Insights into the New Testament Conference, organized by Bart Ehrman at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. One of 10 international speakers for the weekend conference, which had nearly 2,000 attendees, White discussed the thesis and arguments of his forthcoming book with Oxford University Press, entitled Counting Paul: Scientificity, Fuzzy Math, and Ideology in Pauline Studies.
