Trustees approve promotion to associate professor
for four Middlebury faculty members
MIDDLEBURY, Vt.—Courtesy of the president's office, here's a look at recent accomplishments and publications by members of Middlebury's faculty.
At its meeting in December, the College's board of trustees approved promotions for the following faculty members to the rank of associate professor without limit of tenure, effective July 1, 2006: Erik Bleich, Political Science; Jeffrey P. Carpenter, Economics; Jonathan T. Isham Jr., Economics, and Bettina Matthias, German.
Kirsten Hoving (History of Art & Architecture) has received a grant for research in the archives of the Smithsonian American Art Museum this coming winter. This grant provides additional support for her 2005-2006 leave project, Joseph Cornell and Astronomy.
Jeffrey Carpenter (Economics) and Peter Matthews (Economics) have co-authored an article entitled, "No Switchbacks: Rethinking Aspiration-Based Dynamics in the Ultimatum Game," which was published in the June issue of Theory and Decision (Springer Science+Business Media B.V., Formerly Kluwer Academic Publishers B.V. )
Jeffrey Carpenter (Economics) and collaborators from University of Minnesota and the University of Zurich have received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and a private company for a project titled, Truckers and Turnover: Using field experiments to understand driver decision-making. The project will explore the causal factors in driver turnover and driver productivity at a large firm in the "truckload" segment of the U.S. trucking industry.
William Pyle (Economics & International Studies) has received a grant to serve as a visiting researcher at the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition during the summer for 2006. This grant will support continued research on his long term project Business Associations in Post-Communist Russia.
Jason Mittell (American Civilization/Film & Media Culture) has had a book chapter published entitled, "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory," in Thinking Outside the Box: A Contemporary Television Genre Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Brian Rose (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), 37-64.
Several colleagues have been promoted to the rank of assistant professor or visiting assistant professor upon completion of the Ph.D.: John Schmitt, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics; Grace Cho, Assistant Professor of Psychology; Kelly Cole, Visiting Assistant Professor of American Civilization; Jimena Ugaz, Assistant Professor of Spanish; Eliza Garrison, Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture; Ashley Esarey, Assistant Professor of Political Science, and Jill Coleman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology.
Pat Manley (Geology) has been elected to full membership in the Vermont Academy of Science and Engineering. Pat has also received supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Sciences section in support of a second oceanographic cruise to the James Ross Basin. The grant provides funding for Pat's academic leave next spring and one summer undergraduate research student; 4 undergraduates will accompany Pat on this 6-week scientific cruise in March 2006.
Anne Knowles (Geography) was guest editor of a thematic issue of the journal Historical Geography (vol. 33, 2005) on emerging trends in historical GIS. She was also Visiting International Scholar at the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen's University, Belfast in early September 2005.
Matt Landis (Biology) has had an article published in the Journal of Ecology. It is entitled, "Variation in recruitment and early demography in Pinus rigida following crown fire in the pine barrens of Long Island, N.Y." It was co-written with J. Gurevitch, G. Fox, W. Fang, & D. Taub (2005).
Erik Bleich (Political Science) has had an article published: "The Legacies of History? Colonization and Immigrant Integration in Britain and France," in Theory and Society, volume 34, no. 2 (April 2005).
Rebecca Kneale Gould (Religion/Environmental Studies) has had a book, At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America, published by the University of California Press, October 2005. Rebecca was also selected by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture (at Indiana University) as a participant in the Young Scholars program for 2004-2005. Scholars participate in four all-expenses paid conferences over the two years of the program, two devoted to teaching and two to research.
Joanna Stimmel (German) has published an essay entitled, "Retracing the Holocaust: Cosmopolitan and National Memories in Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's Umschlagplatz," in The German Quarterly 78.2 (Spring 2005): 151-171.
Mark Williams (Political Science) has recently published a chapter in an edited volume on American foreign policy entitled: "U.S. Policy in the Andes: Commitments and Commitment Traps," in Russell Crandall and Riordan Roett, eds., Security, Democracy, and Economic Reform in the Andes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2005).
Michael Katz, C.V. Starr Professor of Russian and Dean Emeritus of the Language Schools and Schools Abroad, will receive the 2005 Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (ADFL). The award honors eminent scholar-teachers for exceptional contributions to the field of foreign languages and literatures at the postsecondary level. The Association praises Prof. Katz' achievements at the Language Schools, his service to the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European languages and the ADFL (among other associations), as well as his teaching, and his translation and edition of major texts of Russian literature. A fuller account of this honor already appears on the Middlebury web page.
Richard Romagnoli and Cheryl Faraone (Theatre and Dance) co-produced the 19th season of the College-affiliated professional theatre company, the Potomac Theatre Project, in residence at the Olney Theatre Center for the Arts in Olney, Maryland. The season's repertory included a triple-bill evening ("The American Dream" by Edward Albee; "Press Conference and One for the Road" by Harold Pinter) directed by R. Romagnoli, "Somewhere in the Pacific" by Neal Bell, directed by Jim Petosa, and the premiere of "Lovesong of the Electric Bear" by Snoo Wilson, directed by C. Faraone. In addition, the season included three late night evenings of theatre, "PTP After Dark."
Jeff Munroe (Geology) has received supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation in support of his NSF-funded research investigating the glacial and paleoclimate history of the Uinta Mountains in Utah. This additional funding will fund field work expenses that were originally anticipated to come from other sources.
Middlebury has received funding from the Vermont Dept. of Forests, Parks, and Recreation for continued support of amphibian monitoring at Mt. Mansfield and the Vermont Reptile and Amphibian Atlas. Funds for this project come from the USDA Forest Service via the Vermont Monitoring Cooperative, which is a partnership of the Forest Service, Vermont DFPR, and UVM. Both projects are carried out by Jim Andrews, a research supervisor in the Biology Department.
Jon Isham (Economics) in collaboration with the organization Clean Air-Cool Planet, received funding from the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation to fund expenses associated with the project What Works? Using Insight from Social Change Research to Accelerate the Nascent Climate Movement.
Patricia Saldarriaga (Spanish) has had an article published in a special volume. The article is titled, "El colmenero divino, de Tirso de Molina, como melífero emblema." in: Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. Special volume entitled Ángulos y Perspectivas. Reconsideración de la dramaturgia aurisecular. Vol. 29.1 Fall 2004, 111-27.
Tom Moran (Chinese) has received a grant for his 2005-2006 academic leave from the Blakemore Foundation that will support his residence next spring as Senior Scholar at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Qinghua University in Beijing, China. During his leave he will also be working on a book project titled, Chinese Fiction Writers Since 1950, which is under contract with Buccoli Clark Laymen for the series The Dictionary of Literary Biography.
Jim Butler (Studio Art) was one of ten artists selected for the Artist-in-Residence program at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington last summer. Those selected for this program are chosen from a large pool of artists from around the world who have been nominated for their artistic achievements and willingness to share their professional experience. During his residency he worked collaboratively with other artists and students to experiment with diverse methods of glass fabrication and create an entirely new body of sculpture.
Matt Dickinson (Political Science) has had an article published, "Neustadt, New Institutionalism, and Presidential Decision Making: A Theory and Test," in Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 2 (June, 2005): 259-288.
The book Phani Wunnava (Economics) edited, The Changing Role of Unions: New Forms of Representation, has been selected by Princeton University's library as one of the 2004 Noteworthy Books in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics.
David Colander (Economics) received a three-week Fulbright Senior Specialists grant in Economics to support collaboration with colleagues at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark while on academic leave this year. The project involved assessing both a new methodological approach for the empirical analysis of macroeconomic models and the teaching of this approach.
Ted Perry (Film & Media Culture) took part in Hypothetical Universities, a multi-site interdisciplinary collaboration that was webcast on November 2, 2005. At the core of the webcast is an intermedia performance created by Perry and Hans Breder. Professors and students from Ball State University (USA), the University of Iowa (USA), University of Portsmouth (UK), the Free University of Copenhagen (DK), and the University of Southampton (UK), participated in the live webcast.
Matthew Dickerson (Computer Science) had a research paper published, entitled "Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way," in the Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, 9:1 (2005) 31-52. The paper was co-written by David Eppstein, Michael T. Goodrich and Jeremy Y. Meng.
Kirsten Wandschneider (Economics/International Politics & Economics) had an article published in the October issue of The Financial History Review entitled, "The Baring Crisis and the Brazilian Encilhamento, 1889-1891: An Early Example of Contagion among Emerging Capital Markets" (joint with Gail Triner).
Ugo Skubikowski (Italian) has had a book, Vite italiane, published by the University of Toronto Press.
James Fitzsimmons (Sociology/Anthropology) is co-director of an archaeological research project that has recently made some significant discoveries. For over 20 years the name Hix Witz, or "Jaguar Hill," has been recognized in Mayan texts of the Classic Period (250-850 AD). The initial identification of Hix Witz as the site of Zapote Bobal, Guatemala in 2003 by David Stuart, University of Texas, prompted a flurry of archaeological activity in the area (Breuil et al. 2004; Fitzsimmons 2005) and generated questions about the formation and survival of this newfound polity set amidst larger, historically robust kingdoms. The archaeological project initiated to address these questions, the Proyecto Peten Noroccidente (PNO), directed by James Fitzsimmons and Laura Gamez (Universidad de San Carlos) has resulted in the registration of over 40 hieroglyphic altars and stelae at Zapote Bobal as well as significant advances in the archaeology of this little-known region of the Peten, Guatemala. The project will carry on its program of excavation, restoration, and protection of this archaeological site for the foreseeable future and will continue to provide learning and research opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students interested in the archaeology of this ancient civilization.