Six Middlebury faculty members appointed
to endowed professorships
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. — Courtesy of the Office of the President, here's news on the accomplishments and publications of Middlebury College faculty members and their students.
Several colleagues were appointed by President Ronald D. Liebowitz to endowed professorships on July 1, 2005.
Michael Geisler (German) has been appointed to the C.V. Starr Professorship in Linguistics and Languages.
James Larrabee (Chemistry and Biochemistry) has been appointed William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Chemistry.
Paul Monod (History) has been appointed A. Barton Hepburn Professor.
Michael Kraus (Political Science) has been appointed the Frederick C. Dirks Professor of Economics and Political Science.
Erin Quinn (Physical Education) has been appointed to the Borgen Family Coaching Chair.
Douglas Sprigg (Theater) has been appointed Isabel Riexinger Mettler '39 Professor of Theater.
Funding for research
in the biomedical sciences
Over the next five years, Middlebury College will be one of the baccalaureate partner institutions participating in a project funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health to the University of Vermont. This grant will continue the Vermont Genetics Network support that has been a significant source of funding for faculty and student research over the past three years. Through this new project, titled Vermont IDeA Networks of Biomedical Excellence, the College will receive funds to support grant administration as well as individual faculty and student research projects. In June, the following faculty members received individual one-year grants from this program:
Jeremy Ward (Biology): The Identification and Characterization of the Mammalian Meiotic Mutation mei4. The goal of this research is to identify the mechanism through which mei4 blocks the progression of meiosis and the production of sperm and eggs in reproductive tissues. Proteins involved in similar processes are implicated in cancer, infertility, and Down syndrome.
Roger Sandwick (Chemistry and Biochemistry): The Maillard Reaction between Ribose 5-Phosphate and Cellular Amines. The goal of the research is to examine the spontaneous reaction of ribose 5-phosphate, a cell metabolite, with amino acids and proteins. The investigation will ultimately determine if this natural system is capable of generating products that act as chemical poisons and /or cancer initiators.
Sunhee Choi (Chemistry and Biochemistry): Mechanism and Kinetics of Oxidation of Guanosine Derivatives by Pt(IV) Complexes. The goal of this research is to understand how platinum anticancer drugs interact with DNA. The findings will ultimately help develop better anticancer drugs.
Robert Cluss (Chemistry and Biochemistry): Cytopathic Effect of the Borrelia burgdorferi Exoproteins Oms28 and Enolase. The goal of this research is to determine if two proteins produced by the Lyme disease spirochete are capable of damaging target cells. These studies may eventually lead to a better understanding of Lyme disease in humans.
And in other faculty news:
Tim Spears (American Literature and Civilization) has published a book, Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871-1919. (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Matt Dickinson (Political Science) had an article, co-authored with Andrew Rudalevige, published recently. "Presidents, Responsiveness, and Competence: Revisiting the 'Golden Age' at the Bureau of the Budget" appeared in Political Science Quarterly, Winter 2004-05.
Pat Manley and Tom Manley (Geology) have received a four-year grant from the Lintilhac Foundation to support a project titled, Whole Lake Side Scan Processing with Web Availability. The goal of this project, which will involve at least two undergraduate students, is to amass and synthesize all the side-scan sonar data obtained in previous underwater surveys of the lake into maps for bottom sediment characterization.
Pat Manley (Geology) received funding from the U.S. Geological Survey to support Lake Champlain research expenses related to a USGS project titled, "Abrupt Climate Change in the Eastern United States."
Jeff Carpenter (Economics) has had one edited volume and three book chapters published recently:
Carpenter, J., Harrison, G., List, J., (Eds.) (2005) Field Experiments in Economics. Research in Experimental Economics, Volume 10. JAI Press, Greenwich, CT.
Carpenter, J., Harrison, G., List, J., 2005. "Field Experiments in Economics: An Introduction." In: Carpenter, J., Harrison, G., List, J. (Eds.), Field Experiments in Economics, JAI/Elsevier, Greenwich, Conn, and London, pp.1-16.
Carpenter, J., Burks, S., Verhoogen, E., 2005. "Comparing students to workers: The effects of social framing on behavior in distribution games." In: Carpenter, J., Harrison, G., List, J. (Eds.), Field Experiments in Economics, JAI/Elsevier, Greenwich, Conn. and London, pp. 261-290.
Cardenas, J.C., Carpenter, J., 2005. "Three themes on field experiments and economic development." In: Carpenter, J., List, J., Harrison, G. (Eds.), Field Experiments in Economics, JAI Press, Greenwich, pp. 71-124.
Sujata Moorti (Women's and Gender Studies) has published "Uses of the Diaspora: Indian Popular Culture and the NRI Dilemma," in South Asian Popular Culture 3, no. 1 (2005): 49-62.
Vickie Backus (Biology) has published a review of "A primer of conservation genetics," by R. Frankham, J.D. Ballou and D.A. Briscoe, in the May 2005 issue of the journal Ecology.
Timothy Billings (English) has received a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation to support the publication of his translation and critical analysis of Victor Segalen's collection of French and Chinese poetry, Steles, which is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press in 2006.
Noah Graham (Physics) has received a grant from Research Corporation, a private foundation that aids basic research in the physical sciences. This research will investigate two examples of coherent states of matter in the early universe: Z-strings, which are static filaments of magnetic flux, and oscillons, which are coherent lumps of energy that oscillate without dissipation. At least four undergraduates will be involved in this work over the next two to three years. Project title: Quantum Z-strings and Oscillons in the Electroweak Standard Model.
Paul Sommers (Economics) recently published, with co-authors Richard Barfuss and Robert C. Howard, "Is A Ticket To Cooperstown Getting Any Cheaper?" in Journal of Recreational Mathematics, Volume 32, Issue 4, pp. 302-307.
Patricia Saldarriaga (Spanish) has had an article appear in an edited volume recently. "La magia transportadora en El carnero de Juan Rodríguez Freile" appeared in Der Proze de Imagination. Magie und Empirie in der spanischen Literatur der frühen Neuzeit. Eds. Gerhard Penzkofer and Wolgang Matzat. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2005. 101-11.
Chela Andreu (Spanish) has received a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain's Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities to support a project titled Corin Tellado and Spanish Narrative. The grant will fund one trip to Spain during her 2005-2006 leave to do research on Corin Tellado, the most prolific and widely read Spanish woman writer of the twentieth century.
Susan Watson (Physics) has received supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. This grant will support expenses for undergraduate students to participate in an NSF-funded research project based at Harvard that involves researchers from Middlebury, Harvard and the University of Minnesota.
Robert S. Schine (Religion and Classics) served as consulting scholar and wrote the text for an exhibit titled: "From Pack Peddlers to Professionals: Jewish Life in the Slate Valley of New York and Vermont, 1840-Present," which went up on July 10 at The Slate Valley Museum in Granville, New York, and will be on display until 2007. Shimrit Paley '07 collaborated on the project as research assistant.
Robert has also published an essay titled: " 'The Deleted Word': Implications of an Altered Text by Hermann Hesse," in The New England Review, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 2004).
Mark Southern (German) has had a book, Contagious Couplings: Transmission of Expressives in Yiddish Echo Phrases, published by Greenwood Heinemann (under their Praeger imprint).
The National Science Foundation has awarded a Major Research Instrumentation grant to Middlebury College for acquisition of an LC/MS System (mass spectrometer interfaced with a liquid chromatograph). This project, under the direction of Jeffrey Byers (Chemistry/Biochemistry), will support the research efforts of four faculty members in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and approximately 10 undergraduate students a year.
William Pyle (Economics) has received a Teaching Fellowship from the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council for development of a course entitled, "Legal Institutions and Post-Soviet Economic Development."
Maria Hatjigeorgiou (Religion) had an article, "Silent Beauties: Women in the Mythic Realm of Folk Narratives," published in the volume: The Language of Silence, Vol. II, University of Turku, Finland, 2004. This article re-examines the motif of silence imposed on female figures in folk-tale and mythic narratives, and analyzes how the heroines develop alternative codes of non-verbal expression.
In addition, in Spring 2004, at the invitation of Gregory Nagy, the Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, Maria offered a series of seminars on Modern Greek Poetry under the title "Homeric Themes in the poetry of C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis."