Voices from the Cloisters
Faculty News
Archaeology
Peter Magee has recently published an article, “When was the dromedary domesticated in the ancient Near East?” in Zeitschrift für Orient-Archäologie 8. He and recent Archaeology alum Steven Karacic (PhD 2015) contributed the essay “Geochemical analysis of putative local and Ubaid ceramics from Dosariyah, Saudi Arabia” in Dosariyah - a Neolithic coastal community in Eastern Arabia (ed. P. Drechsler).
Chemistry
Sharon Burgmayer traveled with PhD candidates Ben Williams and Doug Gisewhite to present their latest research at the international conference on Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes held in Balatonfüred, Hungary. The research they presented there was simultaneously published in the journal Inorganic Chemistry entitled "Solvent-Dependent Pyranopterin Cyclization In Molybdenum Cofactor Model Complexes," coauthored by Williams, Gisewhite, and Dean Burgmayer. Read more.
Michelle Francl published “The Enlightenment of Chemistry,” in Nature Chemistry, Vol. 7, Issue 10, Pages 761–762, October 2015. She also wrote an essay, “Clickbait Chemistry,” for the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society, which urges chemists to take to the web in order to fight the spread of misinformation about the presence of chemicals in our food and lives.
Susan White published "Thermodynamic contributions of specific mutations of L30e protein in the RNA: protein interface region measured by analytical ultracentrifugation and gel shift assay,” in Protein Science, Vol. 24, Page 93, October 2015, with Bashkim Kokona (PhD candidate), Sara Kim, Margaret Patchin, and Britt Benner (MA candidate).
Classics
Annette M. Baertschi published an essay, “Epic Elements in Senecan Tragedy”, in: Brill’s Companion to Roman Tragedy, ed. George W. M. Harrison, Leiden/Boston (Brill) 2015, 171-195. Her review of Luc Deitz, Timothy Kircher, and Jonathan Reid (eds.), Neo-Latin and the Humanities: Essays in Honour of Charles E. Fantazzi (Toronto 2014), is forthcoming in: Journal of Jesuit Studies 3 (2016). Professor Baertschi also presented two conference papers this fall: “Enargeia, Imagination, and Critical Reflection in Senecan Tragedy”, 2015 Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS); “Traveling through History and Time: The Catabasis Motif in Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)”, 2015 Annual Film & History Conference.
Catherine Conybeare has three new papers in publication. Two are forthcoming in the new year: ‘How to Lament an Eternal City: the Ambiguous Fall of Rome’, in The Fall of Cities: Commemoration in Lament, Folksong and Liturgy, ed. Mary Bachvarova, Dorota Dutsch, and Ann Suter (Cambridge, 2016), 212-225; ‘Augustine's De Civitate Dei’, in Patriarchal Moments: Reading Patriarchal Texts, ed. Cesare Cuttica and Gaby Muhlberg, Textual Moments in the History of Political Thought (London/ New York, 2016), 43-48. An expanded version of her O’Donnell Lecture in Medieval Latin Studies, which she gave at the University of Toronto in November 2014, appears as ‘Augustini Hipponensis Africitas’, in The Journal of Medieval Latin 25 (2015), 111-30. This November, she gave a paper at Cambridge, 'Dracontius and the Excessive Art of Praise'.
Radcliffe Edmonds published “Imagining the Afterlife in Greek Religion” in Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion, eds. Eidinow, Esther & Julia Kindt, Oxford University Press (2015), pp. 551-563. He also contributed a set of encyclopedia entries—“Orphism and Orphica,” “Orphic Gold Tablets,” “Derveni Papyrus,” “Magic,” “Hecate” and “Curse Tablets”—for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed. Eric Orlin, Routledge (2016). In late November, he presented a paper, “Putting him on a pedestal: (Re)collection and the use of images in Plato’s Phaedrus,” at the Society for Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
History of Art
Homay King has a new book, Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Duke, 2015). In it, she recovers lost meanings of the concept of the virtual in order to rethink contemporary works of digital art. Read more.
Lisa Saltzman published Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects (Chicago, 2015), which explores the changing functions of photography since its invention and what she terms the medium’s “afterlife.” Read more.
Mathematics
Lisa Traynor (together with Frédéric Bourgeois, Université Paris-Sud, and Joshua M. Sabloff, Haverford) published the paper "Lagrangian cobordisms via generating families: Construction and geography" that has appeared in Algebraic & Geometric Topology 15:4 (2015). Professor Traynor participated in a workshop on "Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry in the Statistical Physics of Polymers" at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in Stony Brook, NY, and attended the Field of Dreams Conference run by the Math Alliance in Birmingham, AL, where she was on the panel "How to Choose a Graduate School."
Physics
Xuemei May Cheng led her team, including graduate students Xiao Wang (PhD candidate) and Le Yu, undergraduate student Zhongying Yan, and collaborators from University of Texas at Arlington and Argonne National Laboratory, to study gold nanoparticle synthesis using high-resolution hard x-ray microprobes at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) of Argonne National Laboratory. This research, funded by the National Science Foundation, aims to obtain a fundamental understanding of a new nanoparticle synthesis method. Read more.
David Schaffner traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend the kickoff meeting for the ALPHA project, an ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy) sponsored program aimed at developing technology for possible fusion energy reactors. Read more. In November, Professor Schaffner, presented an invited talk entitled, “The End of the Turbulent Cascade: Exploring possible signatures of MHD turbulent dissipation beyond spectra in a magnetically-dynamic laboratory plasma” at the American Physical Society’s annual Division of Plasma Physics (APS-DPP) meeting held in Savanah, Georgia, where he presented recently published results on turbulent plasma measurements made in the Swarthmore Spheromak Experiment (SSX) at Swarthmore College.
Student News
In November, the Graduate Group in Archaeology, Classics and History of Art hosted its 10th biennial interdisciplinary Symposium, Bright Lights, Big City: The Development and Influence of the Metropolis. Ellen Morris of Barnard College opened the event with a keynote address, “Psychogeography and the Ancient Metropolis.” Working on topics from ancient to modern, students from across North America presented papers that continued Professor Morris’s exploration of the city as a cultural space that works to shape and limit how we interact with one another in the public sphere. This year’s symposium was organized by PhD candidates Maggie Beeler, Anna Moblard Meier, and Abbe Walker.
Archaeology
Nickie Colosimo (PhD candidate) will present a paper at the joint meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and the Society of Classical Studies in January. Her paper, “His and Hers: Gender and Appropriateness in Ancient Greek Dedicatory Practices,” is based on a chapter of her dissertation.
Andrea Samz-Pustol (MA candidate) spent this past summer at the American Excavations at Morgantina's Contrada Agnese Project, which celebrated its 60th anniversary since initial excavation by Princeton in 1955. The excavation focused on the Hellenistic and Roman urban occupation of Morgantina, a Greco-Siculan city in central Sicily. Andrea plans to return to the site in summer 2016. In October, she presented a paper titled "Architectural Terminology for Greek Temples in Herodotus' Histories" at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States Conference in Wilmington, Delaware.
Danielle Smotherman (PhD candidate) will present a paper titled “Breaking the Silence: Philomela in the Athenian World of Images" at the AIA Annual Meeting in San Francisco in January.
Rachel Starry (PhD candidate) presented her paper “Peripheral Centers? Regional Urban Connectivity in the Xanthos Valley and Kibyratis Highlands” at the Biennial Symposium of the Graduate Group in November. She also presented this research in poster form at the annual meeting of the American School of Oriental Research in November and will do so again at the AIA annual meeting in January.
Chemistry
Andy Krasley, along with Professor William P. Malachowski, published “The first report of Lewis acid reagents in the intramolecular Rauhut-Currier reaction,” Tetrahedron Letters 2015, 56, 6073-6076.
Classics
Daniel Crosby (MA candidate) wrote an article to be published in the Pacific Journal, “Engaging with the Digital Humanities: Becoming Productive Scholars of the Humanities in a Digital Age.”
Abbe Walker (PhD candidate) will be presenting her paper “Ancient Lullabies: Magic or Mundane?” at the annual meeting of the Society of Classical Studies in San Francisco in January.
History of Art
Michelle Al Ferzly (MA candidate) held a curatorial fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in the Islamic Art Department.
Michelle Smiley (PhD candidate) held a summer internship at the American Philosophical Society, where she used crowd-sourcing techniques to uncover the stories behind a group of anthropological photographs. Read more.
Shannon Steiner (PhD candidate) has contributed an introduction and translation of a 13th-century alchemical recipe to a forthcoming Cambridge University Press series that compiles primary source materials from the Byzantine era. Read more.
Nava Streiter (PhD candidate) spent the summer exploring new avenues in the burgeoning field of digital art history. Working at The Frick Collection in New York, she helped build a new online resource for researchers interested in the history of art collecting. Read more.
Mechella Yezernitskaya (PhD candidate) presented a paper titled "Beyond Belief: Amazons of Ancient Scythia and Avant-Garde Russia" at the 47th annual Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies on November 22, in Philadelphia.
Mathematics
This December, the Math Department held a professional development workshop on CV writing.
Kathryn Bryant (PhD candidate) gave several talks this semester, including: "Smooth, Definite 4-Manifolds and Why We Love Them" at the Temple Graduate Seminar; "Landmark Results in 4-Manifold Topology" at the Philadelphia Topology Seminar (PACT); and "Slice Implies Mutant Ribbon for Odd, 5-Stranded Pretzel Knots" at the Knots in Washington Conference. She posted a paper on the Mathematics ArXiv, "Slice Implies Mutant Ribbon for Odd, 5-Stranded Pretzel Knots", to be submitted for publication.
Ziva Myer (PhD candidate) served as a graduate mentor at the 2015 EDGE Summer Program, which seeks to prepare women and minority students to succeed in graduate programs in the mathematical sciences. Read more. She also presented several talks, including: "Product structures for Legendrians from generating families" at the Temple Graduate Student Seminar; "Sheaves in Legendrian Knot Theory" at the Philadelphia Topology Seminar (PACT); and "An A-infinity structure for Legendrians from Generating Families" at the Georgia Tech Topology Conference.
Physics
Alex Chartrand (PhD candidate) submitted a paper to the Journal of Chemical Physics titled, "Observations of the high vibrational levels of the B''B-bar state of H2," which is currently under review. His current research analyzes data taken at SOLEIL synchrotron facility on the so-called "cathedral states" of N2, developing theoretical background to aid spectral assignments.
Alumnae/i News
Tony Brown (PhD 2004) has been promoted to full professor of Russian in the Department of Germanic and Russian at Brigham Young University.
Rima Girnius (PhD 2007) has been named Associate Curator of European Painting, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Johanna Gosse (PhD 2014) is serving a two-year term as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Columbia University. She recently published an essay, “Pop, Collaboration, Utopia: Bruce Conner's BREAKAWAY in 1960s Los Angeles,” in Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (2015) 30(2 89): 1-27.
Natalia Hayes (PhD 2003) has accepted a tenure track position as assistant professor of Russian at the Defense Language Institute, Monterey CA. Her new textbook, "Acquiring the Major Speech Functions in Russian," from Kendall/Hunt Publishers will appear in early 2016.
Despina Stratigakos (PhD 1999) has a new book, Hitler at Home (Yale University Press), which received very positive attention from Martin Filler in the recent New York Review of Books (Dec. 17, 2015).
Laura Surtees (PhD 2012) has accepted the new position of Research and Instruction Librarian and Coordinator of Rhys Carpenter Library at Bryn Mawr.
Three former students of Math Professor Emerita Rhonda Hughes teamed up for a new publication. Walter Huddell (PhD 2002), Beth Campbell-Hetrick (MS, Ph.D. 2006), and Matthew Fury (PhD 2010) submitted an article to the 2015 AMMCS-CAIMS Congress. Read more.
Maria Winters (PhD 2014) started as Assistant Professor in the Chemistry department at Delaware Valley University this August. She co-authored a paper, "O-Alkylhydroxylamines as Rationally-designed Mechanism-based Inhibitors of Indoleamine 2,3-Dioxygenase-1," which has been accepted by the European Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.