Faculty update: Professor gets NSF grant to study geography of the Holocaust

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.- Courtesy of the president’s office, here is a look at recent publications and other accomplishments by Middlebury faculty members, and in some cases their students.

Anne Knowles (Geography) has received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled Holocaust Historical GIS that will involve ground-breaking application of GIScience models and methods to carry out four case studies that examine geographic aspects of the Holocaust from the continental to the local scale. This collaborative research effort includes colleagues from Texas State University-San Marcos and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which is providing much of the data for the project, as well as from six universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. Middlebury undergraduates will be working with Knowles to develop a historical GIS of the concentration camp system.

A book by Timothy Billings (English & American Literatures), a translation of poet Victor Segalen’s Stèles, has won the Modern Language Association’s 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Translation of a Literary Work. This is a major national prize, and the book is gorgeous, a work of tremendous scholarship and love. The prize will be presented at the MLA Convention in San Francisco in December.

Jeffrey Carpenter (Economics) has had a co-written chapter appear in a book. The chapter, co-authored with Stephen Burks, Lorenz Goette, Kristen Monaco, and Kay Porter, is titled, “Using Behavioral Economic Field Experiments at a Firm.” The chapter appears in The Analysis of Firms and Employees. Edited by Stefan Bender, Julia Lane, Kathryn Shaw, Fredrik Andersson, and Till von Wachter, the book was published by the University of Chicago Press.

Darién Davis (History) has had two items published recently. The first is a book manuscript: White Face, Black Mask: Africaneity and the Early Social History of Popular Music in Brazil in the Black American and Diasporic Studies published by Michigan State University Press. He also published an article, “Before We Called This Place Home: Precursors of the Brazilian Community in the United States,” in the edited volume Becoming Brazuca: Brazilian Immigration to the United States (Harvard University Press).

Larry Hamberlin (Music) has published an essay, “The Beethoven Allusions in Auf dem Strom (D. 914).” It appears in The Unknown Schubert, edited by Barbara Reul and Lorraine Byrne Bodley (London: Ashgate).

Kirsten Hoving’s (History of Art & Architecture) book, Joseph Cornell and Astronomy: A Case for the Stars, has been published by Princeton University Press. The Press has chosen to feature it as an “academic trade book” and is including it on both their art history and astronomy lists.

Jeff Howarth (Geography) has been promoted to the rank of visiting assistant professor, having completed all requirements for his Ph.D. degree.

John Hunisak’s (History of Art and Architecture) article, “Warhol and Opera: Andy’s Secret,” has appeared in the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition “Warhol Now,” currently featured at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montréal. The catalogue is available in both French and English editions. After Montréal, the exhibition will travel to the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Jonathan Isham (Economics, Environmental Studies) has had an article published, “The Determinants of Water Connection and Water Consumption: Empirical Evidence from a Cambodian Household Survey.” Co-authored with Marcello Basani and Barry Reilly, it appears in World Development.

Hedya Klein (Studio Art) recently enjoyed her first New York solo exhibition. Titled Still a Life, the exhibition ran from October 10 to November 9 at Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn. Hedya took advantage of the unique space of the Kentler gallery to form an earthly constellation of drawings, prints, and drawing animation. The works reflect close observation of small and insignificant things.

Karl Lindholm (American Studies, Dean of Advising) has had an essay published entitled, “Rumors and Facts: William Clarence Matthews’s 1905 Challenge to Major League Baseball’s Color Barrier,” which appeared in this fall’s issue of Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture. Lindholm’s essay investigates the rumor that William Matthews was breaking the color barrier in major league baseball in 1905.

Carrie Reed’s (Chinese) article, “The Lecherous Holy Man and the Maiden in the Box,” has appeared in a recent publication of the Journal of the American Oriental Society.

Peter Ryan (Geology) has received funding from the Lintilhac Foundation to initiate a long-term groundwater monitoring project in the Stowe-Waterbury area of Vermont. The project is a collaboration that also involves the Vermont Geological Survey and will provide data that will be used by Middlebury College geology students doing independent research.

John Schmitt (Mathematics) has had two articles appear recently in print. The article titled, “Graphic sequences with a realization containing a complete multipartite subgraph,” appeared in Discrete Mathematics. A second article, co-authored with Anna Blasiak (‘07) titled, “Degree sum conditions in graph pebbling,” has appeared in Australasian Journal of Combinatorics.

Sallie Sheldon (Biology) has received funding from the National Science Foundation to support student involvement in a collaborative project with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Students each summer will participate in an interdisciplinary research project at Plum Island Sound which will contribute to a better understanding of how salt marsh ecosystems function, and their role in coastal landscapes.

Tatiana Smorodinska (Russian) has had a book published in Russia. K.K. Sluchevsky. The Untimely Poet was published by DNK in St. Petersburg. It is a book on the life and creative work of a Russian poet Konstantin Sluchevsky (1837-1904), and is part of the series “Contemporary Western Slavic Studies” published by DNK.

Paul Sommers (Economics) has had several articles appear recently:

“Voting Irregularities in the 1995 Referendum on Quebec,” was co-authored with Jason Cawley (‘98). It was reprinted by Elections and Exit Polling, edited by Fritz J. Scheuren and Wendy Alvey (John Wiley & Sons).

“When do NFL Quarterbacks Pass Their Prime?” appeared in a recent issue of the Journal of Recreational Mathematics.

“The Changing Hitting Performance Profile in Major League Baseball” appeared in the August issue of Journal of Sports Economics.

“The War in Iraq and the 2006 U.S. Elections” appeared in the August issue of International Advances in Economic Research.

“Win a World Series, Raise Ticket Prices. But, Excessively?” and co-written with Ryan M. Keohane (‘07) appeared in the September issue of Atlantic Economic Journal.

Frank Winkler (Physics) has received funding from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s General Observer Program for a project titled Grain Destruction in Puppis A, that involves collaborators from the Space Telescope Science Institute, North Carolina State, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. With observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope, they plan to use the supernova remnant Puppis A as an interstellar laboratory for studying the effects on dust grains in interstellar space.