ENGLISH – Professor Susanna Ashton held over 20 talks and public events during the past two months at universities, bookstores, libraries, and historic sites promoting A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Escaped Slave who Inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin (NY: The New Press 2024). This Fall, her title made the Wall Street Journal’s annual holiday gift guide and received a glowing review from The New Republic. This past month has also seen her publish a scholarly book review in Criticism and a short essay about a young fugitive on Freedom-seekers.org website. But the most exciting achiement of the fall, as she reports, was appearing in the Merriam Webster Dictionary with her recent writing from The Hartford Courant cited to indicate contemporary usage of the term “working-class.”
HISTORY – Professor Vernon Burton published an article in Slavery & Abolition, “Contested Pasts and Mythic History: Formerly Enslaved Women, Francis Pickens, and the Federal Writer’s Project.” He also co-authored “Can the Constitution and Democracy Survive the Roberts Court?” with Rhetoric, Communication and Information Design Ph.D. student Frances Chapman in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture. On October 16 at Clemson, Burton participated in the panel, “Briggs Before and Beyond” sponsored by the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum. At the Southern Historical Society annual meeting in Kansas City, he chaired a session on slavery, and on October 25 at the graduate student luncheon, he spoke on Digital Humanities and Artificial Intelligence in history. On November 7, Burton keynoted the 32nd annual meeting of the Society of Nineteenth-Century Historians at Augusta University, delivering the inaugural Dicken-Garcia Lecture. He appeared on the “Research Report from Augusta University” podcast on November 12 discussing research on Abraham Lincoln. On November 13, he spoke on his book, Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court as part of Wofford College’s “Defining or Dividing? Contemporary Issues in American Culture and History” lecture series. On November 15 in Columbia, he spoke as part of two panels for the South Carolina Bar Association’s symposium, “The Civil Rights Act of 1964 Turns 60.” He was interviewed and quoted in the Miami Herald on “Who Can the President Pardon?” Also on November 15, at the groundbreaking of the addition to the Benjamin E. Mays Historical Site, which now serves as a museum, the director announced that the addition will be used for the “Orville Vernon Burton Research Library.”
PERFORMING ARTS – Professor of Music Paul Buyer will publish the 2nd edition of his book, Working Toward Excellence, in 2025 with Morgan James Publishing. He is also writing a book chapter on World Percussion as a contributor to The Handbook of Percussion Pedagogy, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2026. Buyer was recently interviewed by Bold Journey magazine, a community that features people’s experiences on leadership, productivity, resilience, confidence, relationships, and mental health, and he was recognized as Professor of the Game at the Clemson-USC game on November 30, 2024.
LANGUAGES –Associate Professor of ASL Jody Cripps, as the editor of the peer-reviewed Society for American Sign Language Journal, worked with Clemson University undergraduates Brooke Turell, Jaylin Dillard, Danielle LaVigne, and Alejandro Mejia-Tejada in publishing three articles related to ASL and Deaf Studies: “Bringing Sign Language Back to Martha’s Vineyard”, “Hereditary Deafness and Society: The Quest of Ethnical Awareness”, and “Inclusion of American Sign Language in Science and Engineering.” Also, in October, Cripps taught deaf professionals about signed music and promoted their creativity in musicality at the second session of the Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf’s Deaf Arts Academy in Winnipeg, Canada. He and his colleague, Pamela Witcher, also presented “Signed Music” to deaf high school-aged students and staff at the Manitoba School for the Deaf. In November, Cripps and his Creative Inquiry students Aislinn Horrell, Alina Romero, Reagan Moore, Brianna Motko, Elizabeth Sabol, and Carolina Strinsky went to Hartford, CT, to explore more about the first deaf school in America and its founding members and the school’s relationship with Martha’s Vineyard. They also went to the 2024 National Humanities Conference in Providence, RI, and provided a presentation titled “Hands Waving: Creating a Signed Language-Friendly Society” with two Clemson alumni, Brooke Turell and Allison Rambo, along with Doreen Simons, who is a deaf community partner. He also published two articles in peer-reviewed journals in November. The first article, titled, “Examining the Audience’s Reaction to The Black Drum—Signed Musical Production,” was published in Participants: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies. The second article he wrote with his colleagues, Elizabeth Austin and Leyla Craig, was “A Case Study of University Mass Casualty Simulation with High-School Deaf Students Who Sign” in the Journal of Emergency Management.
ENGLISH – Assistant Professor Stevie Edwards has been invited to join the editorial board for Sundress Publications, based in Knoxville, TN. As a member of the board, Edwards will help make decisions about winners of book contests, winners of poetry broadside contests, as well as other literary contests.
LANGUAGES – The Clemson German Program, in an effort led by BMW Principal Lecturer of German Lee Ferrell, joined four other Upstate universities and two chambers of Commerce to host the first Upstate Forum for European and American Business (UFEA) on October 22 at Furman University. This conference combined the efforts of USC-Upstate, Furman University, Clemson University, Spartanburg Community College and Greenville Technical College in cooperation with the European American Chamber of Commerce and the Greenville Chamber of Commerce. The event brought together speakers from industry to speak with students and businesses from the Upstate region on the role of Germany in the state of South Carolina. In addition to a keynote presentation by Max Stewart of the Greenville Area Development Corporation, there was also a panel discussion on Germany and the Battery Boom in South Carolina followed by a roundtable session for students hosted by numerous German companies from the region.
ENGLISH – Pearce Professor of Professional Communication Jordan Frith, in collaboration with Sarah Read at Portland State University, was awarded the “Best Paper” award at the annual meeting of the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Design of Communication Special Interest Group. Their paper, titled “Holistic methodologies for fusing material and discursive infrastructures: Tracing the sociotechnical imaginaries that enable the world’s fastest supercomputer” details the development of the two-year project plan they developed for their National Science Foundation-funded project studying the global dynamics of supercomputing infrastructure.
PERFORMING ARTS – Lillian Utsey Harder, Brooks Center director emerita and artistic director of the Utsey Chamber Music Series, secured four broadcasts on American Public Media’s Performance Today: violinist Geneva Lewis and pianist Evren Ozel’s broadcast on October 23 of Stravinsky’s Divertimento from “The Fairy’s Kiss” Suite for violin and piano (arranged by Samuel Dushkin), and Bartok’s Romanian Folk Dances broadcast on November 29 from their concert on March 28, 2024; and Sphinx Virtuosi’s broadcast on November 4 of Carlos Simon’s Between Worlds and broadcast on December 9 of Ricardo Herz’s Sisifo na Cidade Grande from their concert on March 30, 2023.
ENGLISH – Senior Lecturer of English Kathleen Nalley recently participated in the November 9 opening reception of “Turtle Tales,” a multi-artist exhibit that featured the turtle at No. 3 Pottery Gallery in downtown Simpsonville. Alongside seven other poets from across South Carolina, she read two poems created for the event.
LANGUAGES – Professor Johannes Schmidt published an article in the conference volume Johann Gottfried Herder und Bückeburg—»Was habe ich hier ausgerichtet? Wessen kann ich mich rühmen?«, edited by Martin Kessler. The title of Schmidt’s talk and contribution is “Becoming Maverick, Dissenter, and Individualist.Herder’s Orientation during the Bückeburg Years 1771–1776”. The conference took place in Fall 2023 in Bückeburg, Germany, and was organized by the President of the International Herder Society, Martin Keßler.
PERFORMING ARTS – Associate Professor of Theater Kerrie Seymour performed the role of Heidi in What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck in a co-production with LEAN Ensemble Theatre and Furman University Theatre. Through December 29, she is performing the role of Annie Wilkes in an adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery at the Warehouse Theatre.
ENGLISH – Professor Rhondda Robinson Thomas moderated the “Public Histories” panel at the Georgetown and Legacies of Slavery Forum: Honoring Stories, Embracing Communities on Friday, December 6, 2024, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., in collaboration with Dumbarton Oaks, Tudor Place, and The Black Georgetown Foundation. Thomas is researching and documenting the lives of enslaved persons who labored at Dumbarton Oaks for US statesman John C. Calhoun and his family in the early to mid-1820s for her Call My Name project and the Cemetery Hill project.
LANGUAGES – Professor Eric Touya read the paper, “Baudelaire’s Expression of Life: Poetics and Politics of Production in Modernity” at the Semicentennial Colloquium of Nineteenth-Century French Studies 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” at the 25th Annual Conference on Ethics Across the Curriculum at Clemson University. He also published the article entitled “’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, p. 15-25.
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION – Professor and Chair Ben White gave a paper entitled “Acts and the Historical Paul: a Response” at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in San Diego, CA on November 23rd.
