Faculty update: Jay Parini's latest explores books that changed America

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

Jay Parini (English and American Literatures) has published a new book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America, by Doubleday. It has been the subject of wide discussion on radio and television and in print.

Jason Arndt (Psychology) has published two articles recently. One was titled “Elaborative processing and conjunction errors in recognition memory” and was published in Memory & Cognition. His co-author was Todd C. Jones of Victoria University, Wellington. The second was titled “Recognition Without Identification for Words, Pseudowords and Nonwords” and was published in the Journal of Memory and Language. Co-authors were Karen Lee, Middlebury Class of ‘05, and David B. Flora of York University.

Carole Cavanaugh (Japanese Studies) has been offered a Japan Foundation Short-Term Fellowship for a study on independent animated films by contemporary artists.

Matthew Dickerson (Computer Science) has published his latest book, Narnia and the Fields of Arbol: the Environmental Vision of C.S. Lewis. It was printed by University Press of Kentucky as part of their “Culture of the Land” series. The book was co-authored with David O’Hara, Class of ‘91, of Augustana College in South Dakota. In addition, Matt has published a research article on computer algorithms, titled “Two-Site Voronoi Diagrams in Geographic Networks.” It appeared in the Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems and was presented at the ACM GIS conference in Irvine, Calif., November 5-7, 2008.

James Fitzsimmons (Sociology/Anthropology) has two new books in print. The University of Texas Press has published Death and the Classic Maya Kings. The second book, co-authored with Joyce Salisbury, is titled, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Global Medieval Life and Culture, Vol. 1: Europe and the Americas (Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut).

Jim Larrabee (Chemistry and Biochemistry) has had several articles appear in peer-reviewed journals.
   1. Larrabee, J. A.; *Chyun, S-A.; *Volwiler, A. S. “Magnetic Circular Dichroism Study of a Methionine Aminopeptidase/Fumagillin Complex and Dicobalt II-II and II-III Model Complexes” Inorganic Chemistry 2008, 47, 10499-10508.
  2. Hadler, K. S.; Tanifum, E.; Yip, S. H-C.; Mitic, N.; Guddat, L. W.; Jackson, C. J.; Gahan, L. R.; Carr, P.; Ollis, D. L.; Hengge, A. C.; Larrabee, J. A.; Schenk, G. “Substrate Induced Formation of a Catalytically Competent Binuclear Center and Regulation of Reactivity in Glycerophosphodiesterase from Enterobacter aerogenes” Journal of the American Chemical Society 2008, 130, 14129-14138.
  3. Johansson, F. B.; Bond, A. D.; Nielsen, U. G.; Moubaraki, B.; Murray, K. S.; Berry, K. J.; Larrabee, J. A.; McKenzie, C. J. “Dicobalt II-II, II-III and III-III Complexes as Spectroscopic Models for Dicobalt Enzyme Active Sites” Inorganic Chemistry 2008, 47, 5079-5092.

Karl Lindholm (American Studies, ) has had an article published entitled, ” ‘College Boys and Boozers’: Vermont’s Northern League and William Clarence Matthews,” which appeared in the fall 2008 issue of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.

William Poulin-Deltour (French) had an article, “France’s Gais retraités: Questioning the Image of the Closet,” published in Modern & Contemporary France 16 (August 2008).

Robert Schine’s (Religion, Jewish Studies) essay “The Deleted Word-Implications of an Altered Text by Hermann Hesse” has been published in Hebrew translation:????? ??????’: ?????? ?? ????? ????? ??? ???? ???’, in the Israeli journal Yekinton (Tel Aviv), No. 228 (November 2008). The essay originally appeared in the New England Review, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2004).

John Schmitt (Mathematics) had a manuscript recently appear in print, “Graphic sequences with a realization containing a generalized friendship graph.” It was co-authored with Jian-Hua Yin (Hainan University) and Gang Chen (Ningxia University) and appeared in Volume 288 of the journal Discrete Mathematics.

Michael Sheridan (Sociology/Anthropology) has received funding through the Wenner-Gren Foundations in Stockholm, Sweden, in support of his 2008-2009 academic leave. As a visiting professor at Lund University in Sweden during Spring 2009, he will give a series of lectures and work on a research project titled Ethnographic Perspectives on Ecology, Power and Scale. The overall goal of this project is to use an African case study to show how the concepts of “cultural scale” and “social power” can contribute to understanding landscape change from a political ecology perspective.

Tim Spears (American Studies) has published an essay, “The Plow That Broke the Midway,” in the edited volume Sports in Chicago (University of Illinois Press).