Achievements from Faculty in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
View our latest newsletter and read more about Faculty, Student, Digital Scholarship and Alumni Achievements from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archaeology
Assistant Professor Jennie Bradbury joined the faculty of the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. Professor Bradbury recently published "Agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, from the deep past to the modern conflict" in the British Academy Review, co-authored with Philip Proudfoot. In November she gave the talk “The Remembered Dead: Burial Practices in the Ancient Near East” for the Special Collections Friday Finds colloquium in coordination with the ongoing ear-whispered series of art installations and performances by artist Tania El Khoury.
Associate Professor Astrid Lindenlauf presented her paper “A Guide to Cleaning and Maintaining Greek Sanctuaries” at the “Logistics in Greek Sanctuaries: Exploring the human experience of visiting the gods” conference in Athens, Greece in September.
Professor Emeritus Brunilde Ridgway published “The Ludovisi “Suicidal Gaul” and his wife: bronze or marble original, Hellenistic or Roman?” and her review of Françoise-Hélène Massa-Pairault and Claude Pouzadoux’s edited volume Géants et gigantomachies entre Orient et Occident: “Wrestling with Gigantomachies: Archaic, Classical, Apulian, Pergamene & onward," both in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Chemistry
Sharon Burgmayer, Dean of Graduate Studies and W. Alton Jones Professor of Chemistry, co-authored a paper with Doug Gisewhite (Ph.D. Chemistry, '17) and Ben Williams (Ph.D. Chemistry, ’15) entitled "Implications of Pyran Cyclization and Pterin Conformation on Oxidized Forms of the Molybdenum Cofactor" in the Journal of the American Chemical Society alongside co-authors Jing Yang, Alisha Esmail, Ben Stein, and Martin L. Kirk.
Professor Michelle Francl recently recommended her top five books in chemistry in an interview with the popular online magazine, Five Books. Professor Francl also gave her thoughts on the use of metaphor in chemistry, in an article entitled, “It’s alive!” published in Nature Chemistry.
Yan Kung was promoted to Associate Professor of Chemistry. Professor Kung published the article “New crystallographic snapshots of large domain movements in bacterial HMG-CoA reductase,” co-authored with Bryn Mawr College chemistry students Edwin Ragwan and Eri Arai.
Classics
Associate Professor Annette Baertschi chaired a session on "Roman Historical Personages and Places" at the annual CAAS meeting in Philadelphia on October 5th. In November, Professor Baertschi chaired a session entitled "Revolutionary (Re)visions” and presented a paper on "The Politics of Masses in Miklós Janscó’s Szerelmem, Elektra (1974)" in the Classical Antiquity Division of the annual Film & History Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Her article entitled "The Social Process of Trauma in Lucan’s Bellum civile” will appear in the volume Emotional Trauma in Greek and Roman Culture: Representations and Reactions with Routledge in spring 2019.
Professor Catherine Conybeare has been elected to Visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford for the next academic year. Professor Conybeare will be a visiting fellow at All Souls College for the fall and spring terms and at Corpus Christi College for the summer term. This fall, Professor Conybeare participated in a roundtable discussion at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge MA, co-hosted by the British Academy, on the subject of "Truth, Trust, and Expertise." Professor Conybeare also participated in a panel discussion to mark the 25th anniversary of the Africana Studies program at Villanova; with a contribution entitled "Augustine the African."
Professor Radcliffe Edmonds presented on “The Song of the Nightingale: Word Play on the Road to Hades in Plato’s Phaedo, at ETYGR – 2018: 2nd International Conference on Etymological Theories and Practice in Greek, September 28, 2018, Villa Kérylos, Beaulieu sur mer, France. His paper, “First-Born of Night or Oozing from the Slime? Deviant Origins in Orphic Cosmogonies,” was presented at Between Dusk and Dawn: Valuing Night in Classical Antiquity, University of Pennsylvania, June 14, 2018, and at Ex Arches: Looking back at Myths of Origin, The Ohio State University, September 15, 2018. His chapter, “Deviant Origins: Hesiodic Theogony and the Orphica,” was published in The Oxford Handbook of Hesiod, edited by A. Loney & S. Scully, in September. Professor Edmonds will give the invited talk, “Contingent Catastrophe or Agonistic Advantage: The Rhetoric of Violence in Classical Athenian Curses,” at Curses in Context, University of Chicago in April and the special lecture, “Imagining the Underworld: Life After Death in Ancient Greek Religion,” to be presented at the Getty Museum in February. He will also take part in a mini-conference at Boston College on March 25, 2019, focused on the forthcoming work of Hanne Eisenfeld, Only Mostly Dead: Immortality and Related States in Pindar's Victory Odes. His monograph Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in early 2019. Other forthcoming works include: “Misleading and Unclear to the Many: Allegory in the Derveni Papyrus and the Orphic Theogony of Hieronymus”, in In the Shrine of Night: New Studies on the Derveni Papyrus, ed. Santamaria (Brill); “The Ethics of Afterlife in Ancient Greece,” in Early Greek Ethics, ed. David Wolfsdorf, (Oxford University Press); “Underworld,” and “Greek Magic,” entries in the Oxford Classical Dictionary; “Orphic Eschatology” in Eschatology in Antiquity, ed. Hilary F. Marlow, Helen Van Noorden, and Karla Pollmann (Routledge); and “A Path Neither Simple Nor Single: The Afterlife as Good to Think with,” in Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Greece and Beyond, ed. Hopper and Gazis (Liverpool University Press).
Professor Edmonds is planning to hold a mini-conference at Bryn Mawr over the weekend of April 27-28 in conjunction with two graduate seminars, ARCH613: Interrogating the Dead taught by Assistant Professor of Archaeology Jennie Bradbury, and the GSEM620: Death and Beyond, co-taught by Professor Edmonds and Assistant Professor of History of Art Jie Shi. The conference will build connections between the materials in the courses and will invite several scholars to discuss the idea of death as a rite of passage from a number of different perspectives.
History of Art
Professor David Cast published an edited collection of essays by the English painter and teacher Andrew Forge. The book, entitled Observation: Notation, A Selection of the Critical Writings of Andrew Forge: 1955–2002, was released in June by Criterion Books.
Assistant Professor Sylvia Houghteling gave a talk and object-study session entitled “Loss & Memories in Textiles,” for the Special Collections Friday Finds colloquium in coordination with the ongoing ear-whispered series of art installations and performances by artist Tania El Khoury.
Professor Emeritus Dale Kinney published “Communication in a Visual Mode: Papal Apse Mosaics,” in the Journal of Medieval History 44.3 (2018), 311-332.
Assistant Professor Jie Shi was appointed to the Jye Chu Lectureship in Chinese Studies, Bryn Mawr College and presented the lecture “Remodeling the Hand Gesture in the Age of the Silk Roads: The Case of ‘Seven Worthies of Bamboo Grove’ in Fifth-century China,” at a celebratory event. Professor Shi’s book project entitled Modeling Peace: Royal Tombs and Political Ideology in Early China is forthcoming with Columbia University Press in August 2019. His article, “Image, Body, and Simulation of the Afterlife in Prince Yuan Mi’s Sarcophagus in Early Medieval China,” is scheduled for publication in Archives of Asian Art in 2019. Professor Shi gave the talk “The Vision of Immortality in a Princely Stone Sarcophagus in Sixth-Century China,” at the Center for Visual Culture Colloquium on November 14th. In the spring, Professor Shi will present papers at the workshop Questions on the Concept of Landscape in Chinese Art, Princeton University and at the Early China Seminar at Columbia University, and will moderate a session of the 7th Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Early China. This semester, Professor Shi collaborated with Director of Digital Scholarship, Critical Making, and Digital Collections Management Alicia Peaker and Ph.D. Candidate in Archaeology Matthew Jameson on the 3D Digital Reconstruction and Simulation of TLV Bronze Mirrors in Han China, a digital resource that allows users to design their own Han-period bronze mirror in 3D.
Associate Professor Alicia Walker published a chapter “Laughing at Eros and Aphrodite: Sexual Inversion and its Resolution in the Classicising Arts of Medieval Byzantium,” in the book Greek Laughter and Tears: Antiquity and After, edited by Margaret Alexiou and Douglas Cairns. On December 6, Professor Walker gave the talk “Diaspora, Migration, and Identity: Medieval Perspectives on Modern Experience” for the Special Collections Friday Finds colloquium in coordination with the ongoing ear-whispered series of art installations and performances by artist Tania El Khoury.
Mathematics
Assistant Professor John Bergdall joined the department as a faculty member. In September he gave an invited talk on "Approximating roots: from Newton to the ghost conjecture” at Haverford College this fall, as well as invited seminar talks at the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University. In the spring semester Professor Bergdall will be giving an invited talk at the Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Math Society (Hartford, CT) and a colloquium lecture at Notre Dame University.
Associate Professor Djordje Milićević co-organized the Hausdorff School conference “L-Functions: Open Problems and Current Methods” in Bonn, Germany.
Professor Leslie Cheng was appointed as Rachel C. Hale Professor in the Sciences and Mathematics at Commencement 2018 and gave the talk “My Journey Through Harmonic Analysis,” at a celebratory event on November 29th.
Professor Lisa Traynor and Math graduate student Isaac Craig took part in the Topology Students Workshop at Georgia Tech in June; Isaac was a participant and Lisa was a mentor. The workshop serves as both a research conference and a professional development workshop for graduate students in the fields of geometric group theory, geometry, and topology. This year, Isaac and Lisa are using some of the professional development ideas from that workshop as the basis for professional development workshops for the GGSM (Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics) at Bryn Mawr.
Physics
Professor Emeritus Peter Beckmann published H-1 Spin-Lattice Relaxation in Organic Molecular Solids: Polymorphism and the Dependence on Sample Preparation in ChemPhysChem.
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