Southwestern had a great showing at the 2023 Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America, held March 24-26 in Stephenville, TX. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr received the 2023 Ron Barnes Distinguished Service to Students Award, given in recognition of faculty who have distinguished themselves through service and support of undergraduate students within the Texas Section. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton received the 2023 Distinguished Service Award in recognition of faculty who have demonstrated exceptional service to the Texas Section. Shelton also served as Departmental Liaison and participated in the Business Meeting. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross participated in the Project NeXT session. President Emeritus of Southwestern University and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Edward Burger presented an invited plenary talk, “Paper folding for the organically challenged: Uncovering beauty and structure through effective thinking.” We had eight student presentations, one of which won an award, by 13 students and one alum. This was the most student presentations by far of any institution besides the host institution. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura supervised the following student talks: Zek McCormick ’24: “Applying Linear Algebra to Penrose Tilings” won an award for Best Student Paper Within a Session, Oliver Johnson ’24: “How accurately did Van Eyck paint the chandelier in the Arnolfini Portrait? A geometric analysis contributing to a decades-old debate,” and Isabella Robinson ’25, Oliver Johnson ’24: “Solving Sudoku Puzzles Through Linear Algebra.” Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr supervised the following student talks: Anderson Johnson ’24, Paige Thompson ’26, Kyla Gorman ’21: “Domino Antimagic Configurations,” Alley Koenig ’24, Casandra Nunez ’26: “Subtractive Edge Magic Labelings,” Kathryn Altman ’24, Lauren Calzado ’23: “An Exploration of Difference Distance Magic Graph Labelings,” and Aaron Garza ’26, Kaiden Salaz ’26: “What is the smallest area? A parabolic parable.” Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton supervised the following student talk: Emma Lewis ’23, Jillian Reese ’23: “An ODD Look at Theorems in Differential Equations.” This work was funded with a grant from the Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, collaborating with a student team at the University of North Texas-Denton, supervised by Joe Iaia. A team of four students competed in the Math Bowl: Altman, Calzado, Koenig, and Jess Kazmir ’23, Yasmine Soto ’25, and Adrianna Flores-Vivas ’24 also attended the meeting.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han served as chair and discussant in the panel, “Revisiting the Jin from Digital, Political, Geocultural, and Long-Term Perspectives,” at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2023 annual meeting in Boston. The panel was sponsored by the Society for Song, Yuan, and Conquest Dynasties Studies.

Kate Nguyen ’24 and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony co-authored “Non-majors Explore Less Well-Known Contributors to Computing,” which was presented at the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’23).

Professor Emerita Lois Ferrari, Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities Holly Dalrymple, and Instructor of Applied Music Chaz Nailor collaborated with Austin-based soprano Natalie Joy Howard, the Southwestern University Chorale, and the Austin Civic Orchestra to give the Texas premiere of a work recovered, edited, and published by Professor of Music Michael Cooper: the choral/orchestral version of Margaret Bonds’s setting of W.E.B. Du Bois’s iconic Civil Rights Credo. Given on February 25, the performance was many students’ first time singing with an orchestra – and the opportunity to lift their voices in song to proclaim Du Bois’s magisterial text with Margaret Bonds’s music was, in the words of one student, “a life-altering experience.” Those interested in hearing or re-hearing the performance can find it here. The Chorale will perform the Credo again, now in its original version with piano accompaniment, with Professor of Music Bruce Cain (baritone), Part-Time Assistant Professor of Applied Music Julia Taylor (soprano), and Part-Time Instructor of Music Bruce Cain (piano) in another concert at 7:30 p.m. in the Alma Thomas Theater on April 15.

Allison Hentges ’24 and Education Professor Michael Kamen presented “The Reasons for Seasons” (Allison’s King Creativity project), and Kamen and Assistant Professor Debra Plowman (A&M Corpus Christi) presented “Slide Rules: to the Moon and Back” at the International Consortium for Research in Science and Mathematics Education in Panama City, Panama.

Professor of Biochemistry and Garey Chair of Chemistry Maha Zewail-Foote, Cargill Endowed Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore, and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder co-presented a virtual session for the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2023 Conference on Diversity, Equity and Student Success. The mission of the AAC&U conference was to explore the complexities of truth within higher education while examining institutional structures and beliefs that impede diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. The presentation, titled “Cross-Institutional CONNECTions: Mentorship, Truth, Belonging, and Retention,” provided an overview of Southwestern’s ACS-funded FOC CONNECT project, which seeks to dismantle barriers to success experienced by early-career faculty of color (FOC) in the academy. The project supports a cross-institutional faculty mentoring program that connects these scholars with senior faculty of color from other ACS institutions.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented her work, “Activist Echoes: Connecting French Anti-Salazarism to Opposition to the Algerian War,” at a panel on ‘Leftist Expertise” during the joint Society for French Historical Studies and Western Society for French History conference in Detroit over Spring Break. She also moderated a discussion with three authors on their newly published books about youth activism, anti-imperialism, and radical politics in the Francophone world.

Samantha Alvarado ’22 (Anthropology) presented a paper titled “Challenging Norms: Gender, Obstetrics, and the Gynecological Massage in Mexico in the 1920s,” coauthored with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones at the Southern Association for the History of Science and Medicine 2023 Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA. This project was the culmination of a faculty-student research collaboration with Hernández Berrones, who mentored her through the design of the project, archival work in the summer of 2022 in Mexico City, and the production of the conference paper. Alvarado received multiple compliments for the breadth and depth of her project and even an invitation by the editor of the top-notch blog on the history of medicine, Nursing Clio, to submit her work for online publication.

ThuyMi Phung ’23 received the Southern Sociological Society’s 2023 Howard Odum Award for Best Undergraduate Paper for her capstone paper titled, “‘There are always going to be bad people who access guns’: Predictors of Americans’ Perspectives on Gun Violence.” Maria Lowe Professor of Sociology and Morenz Endowed Professor, supervised ThuyMi’s project during this year’s sociology capstone class.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the entry on composer Margaret Bonds for MGG-Online (Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart – Online), the leading German-language encyclopedia of music. It is this African American composer’s first-ever appearance in German musical lexicography and her first in German-language musicology generally. Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in German interest in Bonds and her work in Germany. This article will grant German speakers easier and more authoritative access to reliable information concerning Bonds and her music. Cooper’s entry is available here.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han presented the paper, “An Integrated Empire: The “Great Liao” in the Tenth Century,” at the 233rd Meeting of the American Oriental Society in Los Angeles.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum served as associate editor of a Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Games on the topic of Evolutionary Computation for Games. Schrum worked with several external editors on the issue, which is being published in March 2023. These fellow editors were also co-authors with Schrum on a Guest Editorial for the issue. The issue also contains a peer-reviewed contribution from Schrum, external collaborators, and some of Schrum’s former SCOPE students, Kirby Steckel ’21 and Benjamin Capps ’22. The article “Hybrid Encoding for Generating Large Scale Game Level Patterns with Local Variations” was already available via Early Access on IEEE Xplore but has now been officially published.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson was interviewed on March 17, 2023, by students at Colorado College in a course called “The Idea of Latin America” taught by Dr. Santiago Guerra ’03 about her book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize(Rutgers 2018). The interview will be published as part of the podcast series produced by the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies. Listen to the podcast here.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the invited faculty speaker at the Underrepresented Students in Topology and Algebra Research Symposium (USTARS) on March 18-19. She gave a presentation called “Rigidity in Math and Mathematicians,” covering her work in marked length spectrum rigidity and the rigidity mathematicians force upon each other to conform to the field’s norms.

Arden Neff ’25 presented a poster at the 126th annual meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences in San Angelo, Texas, on March 3-4, 2023. In this work, begun as a community-engaged learning project in the Fall 2022 Operations Research course, Neff and Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony investigated the use of operations research for issues relevant to small agricultural businesses. The poster, “Optimizing Grape Harvest Timing and Yield using Linear Programming,” won first place in the Mathematics and Computer Science poster section.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave two invited talks on her work, “Unique Equilibrium States for Geodesic Flows on Translation Surfaces,” last week. Once at a conference called A Dynamical Weekend at Wesleyan on March 4 and once at the University of Houston’s Dynamics Seminar on March 9.

Associate Professor of Business Debika Sihi presented her research project titled “Have We Reached a Privacy Plateau? Consumers’ Evolving Privacy Concerns and Their Alignment with Increased State Regulations” at the Association of Collegiate Marketing Educators Annual Conference held March 6-11, 2023, in Houston, Texas. The project explores the privacy paradox and consumers’ willingness to share information online despite stated privacy concerns and growing consumer data protection regulations (at the U.S. state level).

Professor of Education Michael Kamen has been elected to the Board of Directors of The Association for the Study of Play (TASP).

Domenic Cordova ’23 and Nina Woodward ’25 presented their work with Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby on March 4 at the Capitol of Texas Undergraduate Research Conference (CTURC), hosted on UT Austin’s campus. Cordova presented a poster entitled “A Low-Cost Affordable Bioprinter Attachment for an Ender 3 3D Printer,” and Woodward presented a poster entitled “An ImageJ Script to Analyze the Printability of Bioprinted Lattices.” Both earned complimentary reviews from the judging panel.

Assistant Professor of Theatre Gabriel Peña presented a workshop at SETC (the Southeastern Theatre Conference) in Lexington, Kentucky, on March 3. His workshop “Sensing Possibilities: Feldenkrais Method and its Potential Applications for Performers” explored how Awareness Through Movement lessons, often utilized as physical therapy, can be resourceful to actors.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson gave a talk on her book Becoming Creole: Nature and Race in Belize (Rutgers 2018) to the community of Lemonal, Belize, one of the villages that the book is about, on Sunday, February 26, 2023. As a result of social media advertising about the talk, Johnson was invited onto Channel 7 News Belize’s morning television show, Sun Up on 7, to discuss the book in their studio on Thursday, February 23, 2023. The news segment starts around minute 30 here.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower recorded an episode for the “Tudors Dynasty” Podcast. In the episode, Hower’s co-author, Valerie Schutte, and Hower discussed their two-book edited collection, Mary I in Writing and Writing Mary I, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in mid-2022, and the complicated life and afterlife of England’s first crowned queen regnant. The pair were the final, culminating episode in a special series on Mary I. “Tudors Dynasty” has been running since 2017 and has over 130,000 downloads per month. The episode is available here.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala steered several student projects that were presented and recognized at a highly selective regional conference. Five Southwestern students traveled to Phoenix, Arizona, to present their research at the 2023 Undergraduate Scholars Research Conference hosted by the Western States Communication Association. This marks the third conference Bahrainwala has mentored her students through. Faculty reviewers and the conference Chair commended the students afterward and attempted to recruit them to their graduate programs. These outstanding students also swept the awards, winning three out of the four Top Paper Awards presented at this conference. Katie Love ’23 won a Top Paper Award for her paper “It’s About Damn Time: Lizzo’s Impact on Fat Identity, Fat Celebrity, and Societal Perceptions of Fatness.” Preston Willis ’23 won a Top Paper Award for his paper “Queer Icons & Queering Iconography: Lady Gaga’s Liberal Use of Religion in Born This Way.” Jenna Baird ’23 presented her paper “The Animalization of Blackness within Disney’s Animated Films: New Imagined Ways of Being Racist.” Jordan Preston ’23 won a Top Paper Award for her paper “Miley Cyrus: White Feminism and Queernormativity in Contemporary Pop Culture.” Caden Cox ’23 presented his paper “Shaping Your Type: How Dating Apps Effect and Influence Queer Relationships For Men.” This is the second time Cox was invited to present at this conference and received a Top Paper Award from this conference last year. Southwestern students Nina Mitrofanova ’23 and Alli Ziehm ’23 were also invited to present. Congratulations to these outstanding students!

Associate Professor of Psychology Carin Perilloux and students Madeline Bollinger ’24, Laurel Mulkey ’24, and Vy Nguyen ’23 presented a poster titled “Calm Yourself Up? Converse Effects of ASMR on Heart Rate and GSR” at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in Atlanta this past weekend. This reflects work completed during SCOPE 2022.

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe was invited to attend the opening of a major new exhibition of Roman painting at the San Antonio Museum of Art, “Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii,” on February 23. Howe was part of the technical advisory committee for the exhibit, and several frescoes from his archaeological site of the Roman villas of Stabiae were included in the exhibit. The exhibit will be open until May 21, 2023. Howe will be lecturing in San Antonio on recent discoveries from his site in April.

Professor of Biology Romi Burks engaged in a number of off-campus presentations in February about her research on apple snails and environmental DNA and also her passion and philosophy of teaching through chocolate. The chocolate events occurred in person, while the science talks occurred as part of a federal government-sponsored workshop and a Texas-based science podcast. On February 12: Not Just a Casual Love Affair: How to Cultivate a Real Relationship with Chocolate; Lecture and tasting at the Rockport Center for the Arts, February 17: Biology & Chemistry of Chocolate; Lecture and tasting for Westwood High School Enrichment Program, February 21st: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t? Using eDNA to confirm removal of invasive snails by local agency; APHIS-USDA 2023 Apple Snail Workshop, and February 24th: Science Stories Podcast (Live on community radio station KZSM) with Dr. Mateo Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher at Texas State University.

Assistant Professor of Economics Chandrayee Chatterjee presented her paper titled “Impact of the Nature and Timing of Affirmative Action: Evidence from a Laboratory Experiment” at the 2023 Annual Conference of the Eastern Economic Association in New York City from February 23rd to 26th.

Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarco recently had a research paper published in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment titled “Composted biosolids for enhanced soil organic carbon and water storage in perennial pastures in Colorado”. This work was part of Dr. DeMarco’s former graduate student’s thesis and focuses on how we can manage pasture lands to sequester carbon into the soil as a climate change mitigation strategy. The paper can be accessed here.

Associate Professor of History Melissa Byrnes published a review, “The Last Dreams of Empire,” as part of a Tocqueville21 forum discussing Megan Brown’s recent book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community.

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano and psychology major Will Hebl ’23 presented a poster entitled “How Common is Undergraduate Publication in Psychology” at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Atlanta, Georgia, this past weekend.

Professor of Communications Studies Valerie Renegar and Kristi Cole co-edited the book Refiguring Motherhood Beyond Biology, which was published this month. The book features essays that challenge the biological expectations of motherhood and features work by communication, rhetoric, and motherhood scholars across the country, including Southwestern’s Renegar, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala, Professor of Spanish Katy Ross, and her student Bailey Barlow ’23.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth served as a judge at the Texas State German Contest. On February 25, 2023, Texas State University in San Marcos hosted the Texas State German Contest on its 41st anniversary. This scholastic competition for high school students brought together over 1,000 high school students and their teachers from all over Texas. Engagement with this event marks an important aspect of Berroth’s commitment to community building and outreach. It was a wonderful opportunity to encourage young learners to continue their studies of languages, literature, and cultures.

Assistant Director of Outdoor Adventure Branndon Bargo was the keynote speaker at the Texas Outdoor Leadership Conference (TOLC) held at the University of Houston. Over 160 outdoor leaders from nearly a dozen Texas universities were in attendance. TOLC provides regional outdoor program administrators, educators, and students a unique opportunity to network, develop backcountry skills and exchange ideas associated with outdoor leadership, risk management, and environmental stewardship.

Assistant Professor of Business Raji Kunapuli presented a paper titled “Effect of IPO communication on types of institutional investors” at the JMS Publishing Workshop, organized by the Journal of Management Studies at the Florida International University, Miami, FL.

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano recently delivered a “Guest Expert Webinar” for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. Her presentation was titled “Lessons Learned from Two Decades of Publishing with Undergraduates.” The NCFDD’s mission is to provide underrepresented faculty at member schools with on-demand access to mentoring, tools, and support to thrive in academia– including help with planning, productivity, healthy relationships, and work-life balance.

Director of Smith Library Center Alexia Riggs has been elected as the incoming chair of the College and University Library Division (CULD) for the Texas Library Association (TLA). The Chair also serves as the President of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) state chapter. This three-year term includes work promoting and advocating for Texas academic libraries and creating professional development programming for Texas librarians.

Professor of English Michael Saenger and Associate Professor of Theatre Sergio Costola collaborated on a book titled Shakespeare in Succession: Translation and Time (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023). The edited collection brings together scholars from eight different countries and five continents.

Sr. Director of Integrative and Community-Engaged Learning Sarah Brackmann co-presented “Community-Engaged Learning Is Better Together: What We Discovered Facilitating a Multi-Institutional CEL Community of Practice” with Sascha Goluboff (Washington & Lee University) at the AACU Annual Meeting. They shared lessons learned from a year-long community of practice focusing on community-engaged learning (CEL) across the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS).

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and Sr. Director of Integrative and Community-Engaged Learning Sarah Brackmann co-presented at AACU’s Annual Meeting. Their presentation, “Building a Campus-Wide Integrated Voter Engagement Effort,” highlighted Southwestern’s success in building and institutionalizing a voter registration, education, and engagement program that spans the student experience.

On February 8-10, Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe was invited to do a department review of an undergraduate interdisciplinary architecture major at Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, AL, of a program introduced five years ago largely based on the Architecture Minor which Howe introduced at Southwestern in 1985.

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano participated at the 4th Annual College Readiness Symposium (Breaking Barriers, Growing Generations) sponsored by the Austin ISD and held at St. Edwards University on Saturday, Feb 11th. Dr. Giuliano gave two sessions of a presentation called “A Professor’s Tips for Succeeding in College.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ana Esteve Llorens presented an exhibition of new work at Set Espai d’Art Gallery in Valencia, Spain (on view through March 11). The project, titled Paisaje, extends my research on what I define as “Spatial Weavings.” Through this new series of works, Esteve Llorens proposes alternative ways of approaching artistic creation and the revision of classic art genres, such as landscape representation. Using textile production techniques that have been historically relegated to a second plane, Esteve Llorens claims space: the physical space generated by the pieces themselves and the space offered by the titles where Esteve Llorens quote and include sentences extracted from texts by feminist writers and thinkers. Only natural materials allow her to continue to research the sculptural possibilities of fibers, approaching an abstraction that she envisions as a space for action, inclusion, and freedom.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been teaching and coaching top young talents in the greater Austin area. Three of her students won Cello Audition in the 2022–2023 Texas All-State Symphony, Philharmonic, and Sinfonietta Orchestras, sponsored by the Texas Music Educators Association; and two of her students from St. Stephen’s School won cello auditions for the Texas Private School Music Educator Association (TPSMEA) 2022–2023 All-State Orchestra.

Inversion Ensemble presents the world premiere of “Extinction,” a choral setting by Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis of Kim Stafford’s poem “An Extinction” for its Planet Home concert, with a soundscape by Seylon Stills. Attend the performances on Saturday, February 25, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday, February 26, 2023, at 3 p.m. The Rosette 3908 Avenue B Ste 116, Austin, TX 78751. Tickets are available here.

Assistant Professor of Biology Kim McArthur, with co-authors Emma Astad ’21, Emmett Griffin-Baldwin ’22, Bria Tovar ’22, and Tori Tovar ’22, wrote a research article recently accepted in the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The article, entitled “Early development of respiratory motor circuits in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio),” uses a combination of behavioral analysis and functional calcium imaging to reveal the developmental time course of early synaptic inputs from respiratory, central pattern-generating circuits to the cranial motor neurons that generate coordinated breathing behaviors. This work provides critical foundational information about the development of an emerging model circuit in developmental neurobiology, setting the stage for future work probing the mechanisms of synapse development.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth is co-editor of the recently published volume: “Behinderungen und Herausforderungen. Disability Studies in der Germanistik.” (Sektion) Wege der Germanistik in transkultureller Perspektive. Akten des IX. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik (IVG). (Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik. Beihefte 5). Bd. 5 . Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 2022, 463-605. Included in this volume is Berroth’s research article on representations of Deaf Cultures in German film: “Repräsentationen von Gehörlosigkeit im Film – Jenseits der Stille im Kontext der ‘Deaf Futures.’” 489-506.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder participated on a panel titled “Fostering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Faculty Evaluation Processes” at the 2023 American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) annual meeting in San Francisco, CA, January 18-20, 2023. The panel included deans and faculty development and assessment professionals from Furman, Rhodes, Rollins, and Southwestern who shared how the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) addressed the following challenge: how do we honor the complexity of faculty work, the principles of DEI, and the distinctiveness of institutional context while implementing faculty evaluation processes that are, on the one hand, robust, rigorous, and systematic, and on the other, holistic, developmental, and fair? The ACS tackled this challenge through an Arthur Vining Davis grant devoted to improving faculty evaluation processes to, among other things, mitigate bias in student evaluations of teaching, adopt multiple measures of teaching, and assess faculty workloads for equity. The panel shared key lessons learned from developing a faculty evaluation toolkit and some of the strongest resources that support more holistic, authentic, transparent, and equitable faculty evaluation.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was interviewed on the podcast “Her Music Academia,” founded by Lydia Bangura, a music theory Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan who is interested in “the intersection of performance and analysis, and the performance of Black feminism in American classical music.” The episode’s conversation retraces the long and winding trail of Cooper’s work on Florence Price and Margaret Bonds. The episode “get[s] into the weeds” (as Bangura puts it) about the powers, good and bad, wielded by music publishing houses, talks about Price and Bonds, and features a powerful reading by Dr. Candace Kerr Johnson (UC Berkeley) of a speech (discovered by Cooper) in which Margaret Bonds talks about her African American ancestral heritage, her experiences with racism at Northwestern University as well as Bonds’s recently discovered “Tangamerican,” which Cooper discovered in 2018 and published in 2021. The episode is on all major podcasting platforms and via Bangura’s anchor site.

Interim Vice President for Student Life Brit Katz provided the keynote address for the annual conference for national fraternity and sorority Executive Directors and Presidents on January 8 in Tampa, FL. The title of the presentation was “Quo Vadis? Life with Millennials and Gen Z.”

Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean attended the Annual Meeting of the American Kinesiology Association in San Diego, where he received the Distinguished Leadership Award for Undergraduate Institutions. This award recognizes an individual’s outstanding administrative and leadership performance at an AKA member institution who contributes to the attainment of their kinesiology unit’s strategic goals.

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone has been selected to serve on the J. Frank Dobie Library Trust Awards committee. The trust set up by J. Frank Dobie ’1910

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone presented on the early history of the Georgetown branch of the American Association of University Women at their recent centennial event.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, with co-authors Bonnie Henderson ’18 and Michael Gebhardt ’16, published a chapter, “Acrobatics in a Parametric Arena,” in Mathematics Research for the Beginning Student. The volume is part of the book series, Foundation for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (FURM), which is devoted to increasing access to undergraduate research opportunities. Parts of Gebhardt’s and Henderson’s Mathematics capstone projects supervised by Shelton were included in this chapter. Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean aided in data collection from video capture software generated by Henderson’s juggling of flower sticks in the fall of 2017. Research Assistants for this project included E. Wilson Cook ’22, Audrey Schumacher ’23, and Emily Thompson ’22

Three faculty members and a student joined over five thousand mathematicians at the largest math gathering in the world, Joint Mathematics Meetings, in Boston, MA, January 4-7, 2023. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the undergraduate mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) were among the fifteen partner professional organizations. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Isoperimetric solutions to a 1-dimensional problem within regions and log-concave density” in the AMS Contributed Paper Session on Topics in Analysis and Control Theory. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a four-hour Professional Enhancement Program, “Visualizing Projective Geometry Through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Distance Magic Labelings of Directed Graphs” in the AMS Special Session on The Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Program (EDGE): Pure and Applied Talks by Women Math Warriors. She also participated in multiple events in her capacity as Co-director of EDGE. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Cars, Competition, and Cholera” in the AMS Special Session on Stimulating Student Engagement in Differential Equations through Modeling Activities. Oliver Johnson ’24 presented “Perspective Analysis of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait” in the PME Contributed Session on Research by Undergraduates. This research was supervised by Futamura.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with students Sarah Friday ’21, Jordan Smith ’21, and Aaron Waclawczyk ’21, published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications. The paper “Powers of Defective Matrices From Diagonalizable Dilations” resulted from research started during SCOPE in the summer of 2019. The article can be found here.

Professor of English Michael Saenger co-authored an essay with Cary Nelson, who is Professor Emeritus of English and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and served as president of the American Association of University Professors between 2006 and 2012. The essay, entitled, “When Discourse about Israel Becomes Antisemitic: A Guide for the Perplexed.” Fathom is a prominent British journal that focuses on the Middle East. Read the essay here.

Professor of Spanish Laura Senio Blair 2023 has been selected as one of the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) 10 academic leadership fellows. The program is aimed at providing leadership experiences to a diverse cohort of humanities faculty members and will combine leadership training, mentoring, and hands-on leadership experiences for a diverse group of tenured humanities faculty as they enter administration leadership.

Assistant Professor of History Soojung Han presented the paper, “The Newly Integrated Empire: Liao Taizong’s Rule over the Middle Kingdom,” at the Kitan Network Annual Symposium 2023, hosted by Waseda University and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Jeffrey Easton was invited by the editors of the peer-reviewed journal, Phoenix, to review a new book on the Roman dictatorship by Mark B. Wilson (2021, University of Michigan Press). The book provides a much-needed update on this ancient office through analysis of written texts, epigraphic documents, and modern theoretical approaches. Easton’s review is published in the current issue of Phoenix (Volume 75, Spring/Summer 2021, pp. 171-4).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Jeffrey Easton presented a paper at the joint Society for Classical Studies/Archaeological Institute of America Annual Meeting in New Orleans. The paper, entitled ‘What’s in a Name: The Ferrarii and Roman occupational associations in the Bay of Baratti and central and southern Spain,’ analyzed a group of Romans with a rare family name to better understand the socioeconomic experience of workers involved in the lowest levels of the metalworking industry.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower presented a paper titled “The Municipal Doomsday Machinist? Ralph de Toledano and the Popularization of Public Sector Union Critiques in Postwar America” to the DC Labor History Seminar Series on January 13.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited as a lecturer and discussant to the inquiry immersion elective course on Decolonization within the Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He virtually gave the talk: “Colonial Legacies in the Mexican Pharmaceutical Industry: The Instituto Médico Nacional (1888-1905) and the Exploration of Medicinal Plants” to medical students and guided a discussion about how to dismantle those legacies.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the first-ever edition of Margaret Bonds’ “Sleep Song” (text by Joyce Kilmer), written ninety-one years ago this year, as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series with Hildegard Publishing Co. Scored for women’s chorus and piano, it is a lullaby, likening the silver moon, watching lovingly over the sleeping earth with cloak and shoon, to the speaker as she watches her “little maid” drift off to sleep: “Your life, your love, your dreams are mine to keep / So sleep, so sleep.” Margaret Bonds gives musical voice to that protective parental devotion with delicacy, tenderness, and warmth. A plus is that this choral score was copied by Bonds’ friend and collaborator Florence B. Price – a circumstance that makes this the closest thing the modern world has to a compositional collaboration between the two great composers.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published the world-premiere edition of Margaret Bonds’ setting of the iconic spiritual “We Shall Overcome” (for soprano solo, SATB chorus, bongo, and tambourine) as part of the Margaret Bonds Signature Series of Hildegard Publishing Co. (Worcester, Mass.). Running to a remarkable 130 measures, the setting employs a wide array of musical styles, making it the most original setting of a ubiquitous social-justice hymn ever written. It was commissioned by legendary soprano Leontyne Price, a close friend and collaborator of Bonds, in September 1969 but has had to wait nearly 54 years for publication. Now, though, it has overcome the silence forcibly imposed on it by a musical world determined to silence the voice of resistance tendered by this African American woman composer who was doubly damned by her race and her sex.

Professor of English Michael Saenger delivered an invited talk at the Academic Engagement Network’s Short Course in Miami on January 9. The talk was entitled “Addressing Challenges in the Humanities & Social Sciences: Toward a Better Understanding & Use of Key Terms in Combating BDS and Israel Delegitimization.”

Three faculty members and a student joined over five thousand mathematicians at the largest math gathering in the world, Joint Mathematics Meetings, in Boston, MA, January 4-7, 2023. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the undergraduate mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) were among the fifteen partner professional organizations. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Isoperimetric solutions to a 1-dimensional problem within regions and log-concave density” in the AMS Contributed Paper Session on Topics in Analysis and Control Theory. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a four-hour Professional Enhancement Program, “Visualizing Projective Geometry Through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Distance Magic Labelings of Directed Graphs” in the AMS Special Session on The Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Program (EDGE): Pure and Applied Talks by Women Math Warriors. She also participated in multiple events in her capacity as Co-director of EDGE. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Cars, Competition, and Cholera” in the AMS Special Session on Stimulating Student Engagement in Differential Equations through Modeling Activities. Oliver Johnson ’24 presented “Perspective Analysis of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait” in the PME Contributed Session on Research by Undergraduates. This research was supervised by Futamura.

Professor of Theatre Desiderio Roybal designed A Christmas Carol for Penfold Theatre, which was presented at Old Settlers Hall in Round Rock, Texas, December 8-23. The classic radio cast production involved the design of a 1930s radio broadcast venue where five female actors represented all characters while also hand-operating Foley sound effects. The production ran at Old Settlers Hall December 8-18 before moving to the Driskill Hotel in Austin for a two-night run December 22 and 23.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with students Sarah Friday ’21, Jordan Smith ’21, and Aaron Waclawczyk ’21, published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications. The paper “Powers of Defective Matrices From Diagonalizable Dilations” resulted from research started during SCOPE in the summer of 2019. The article can be found here.

Professor of Psychology Fay Guarraci and current students Megan Kelly ’23, Amanda Gale ’23, Jasmine Belfield ’23, and Natalie Williams ’25, as well as alums Layla Avendano ’22, Cler Estoestra ’22, Brooke Frohock ’21, Lily Yepez ’22, and Bernard Sencherey ’22, recently published the article “Chronic periadolescent leuprolide exposure affects the development of reproductive physiology and behavior of female and male rats differently, but both mature after treatment termination” in Biology of Sex Differences.

Interim Vice President for Student Life Brit Katz facilitated the 2023 Leadership Education for the Southern Athletics Association Student-Athletes’ Advisory Council. The event occurred on January 7-8 in Jackson, TN.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer and Benjamin Call (University of Illinois Chicago) applied for and won funding from the American Institute of Mathematics to organize a research community called Big Ideas in Dynamics in 2023. They will have 3-5 experts in dynamical systems give talks on one of the “big ideas” that underlies one of their papers. These talks will serve as jumping-off points for graduate student reading groups centered on the associated papers. Each paper will have an assigned mentor for graduate students to reach out to. Sawyer and Call hope to have the reading groups culminate in graduate students giving expository talks at a conference on the details of the paper and discussing related open problems.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala attended the El Mundo Zurdo conference for the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa at the University of Texas at San Antonio from November 4-5. The roundtable that Bahrainwala and Sendejo co-organized was titled “Reflections on Radical Love, Care, and Consent: How Anzaldúa Informs Our Liberatory Praxis.” Bahrainwala presented “Pandemic lessons: Consent as anti-Racism,” and Sendejo presented “Movidas of Healing: The Spirit Work of Movement Era Chicanas.” The roundtable was well attended by lead scholars in the field of Anzaldúan Thought.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo attended the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from November 10-13. This year’s conference theme was “Killing Rage: Resistance on the Other Side of Freedom.” Sendejo presented a paper titled “The Spirit Work of bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa: Lessons on Radical Love as Resistance,” which drew from her book manuscript in progress.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer and Benjamin Call (University of Illinois Chicago) applied for and won funding from the American Institute of Mathematics to organize a research community called Big Ideas in Dynamics in 2023. They will have 3-5 experts in dynamical systems give talks on one of the “big ideas” that underlies one of their papers. These talks will serve as jumping-off points for graduate student reading groups centered on the associated papers. Each paper will have an assigned mentor for graduate students to reach out to. Sawyer and Call hope to have the reading groups culminate in graduate students giving expository talks at a conference on the details of the paper and discussing related open problems.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited to participate in the seminar Itinerante of History and Historiography of Sciences and Technologies jointly hosted by UNAM, CINVESTAV, and COLMEX. He responded to and commented on the presentation “El genérico espectacular: los medicamentos y la simipolítica en México,” The Spectacular Generic: Pharmaceuticals and theSimipolitical in Mexico by Cori Hayden. The seminar was broadcasted on YouTube and Facebook.

Professor of Spanish Katy Ross, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha, and Catherine Hiebel ’22 published an article in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Their article, “Populism and Surrogacy in Spain,” can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala was an invited virtual speaker at the University of Nevada, Reno in an undergraduate seminar on New Media. The talk focused on feminist surveillance studies and surveillance ecosystems in public spaces built for children.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala attended the National Communication Association Convention in New Orleans from November 16-19, during which time she received a Distinguished Scholarship Award for Top Article from the International and Intercultural Communication Division. Bahrainwala organized, chaired, and presented on a panel titled Queer Desi Kinship, exploring how queering the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan offers non-Western lessons towards queer scholarship, and fulfilled her commitments as Second Vice-Chair of the Feminist and Women Studies Division.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala was an invited virtual speaker at Arizona State University in the graduate seminar Rhetorical Methods. Students read two of Bahrainwala’s publications on equity work in the academy, and her talk focused on the role of critic in rhetorical criticism and maintaining energy while doing the difficult labor of critiquing inequitable structures.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ana Esteve Llorens was awarded the Grupo Radio Gandia Prize, in its XII Edition, in the category of Art. This annual event recognizes the work and contributions of people, entities, groups, or companies from Valencia, Spain, from different professional fields. An interview and online publication of the news can be found here.

In June of this year, Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made video recordings of works written for them. They are releasing them as the editing process is completed. The next video in this series, Luz, is the fourth song from the cycle Sobre La Naturaleza by Diego Luzuriaga. The composer, originating from Ecuador, has a special affinity for writing music derived from traditional sources and connects deeply with themes from the natural world. The video can be viewed here.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder had his paper titled “An American Tragedy: The Fall of Afghanistan” accepted for publication in the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Several compositions by Part-Time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis are enjoying their premieres. “Oure Light in Oure Night” (2020) for voices and nature soundtrack gets its in-person premiere in Seattle on December 1 and 7, 2022, by the University of Washington combined choirs and in San Francisco on December 9 by the San Francisco State University choir. Portia Hansen and David Utterback recently premiered “Ma’iingan” for flute and piano at Southwestern. On January 21, Inversion Da Capo premieres “Julian’s Hazelnut” for treble choir and clarinet, using the original pronunciation of Julian of Norwich’s Middle English text. See more information here.

A wonderful interdisciplinary group from Southwestern participated in the 17th Annual Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC), held this year at the University of Texas at Austin on October 29. Carson Vogel ’23 presented “Modeling Heat Transfer.” This project is a continuation of the 2021 and 2022 SCOPE projects under the supervision of Professor of Physics Steven Alexander and Associate Professor of Physics Mark Bottorf. This work is part of ongoing efforts for the eventual development of a solar energy storage cell; a problem brought to Southwestern by Coordinator of Science Facilities and Equipment Oscar Lee Fellows. Melanie Richey ’23 presented “Rats on the Run: Modeling of Hippocampal Cell Activity Using Plasticity.” Her project is a continuation of a 2022 Research Experience for Undergraduates at Southern Methodist University under the supervision of Dr. Katie Hedrick in collaboration with Dr. Brad E. Pfeiffer, Department of Neuroscience, UT Southwestern Medical Center. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton also attended the conference. Marr chaired a student presentation session. Shelton supervised Vogel’s and Richey’s current work, preliminary results for their mathematics capstone projects. Jillian Reese ’23 and Emma Lewis ’23 joined with their counterparts from the University of North Texas-Denton in research with Shelton and Dr. Joe Iaia, funded through the Council for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. Other students also attended: Oliver Johnson ’23, Jess Kazmir ’23, Lauren Calzado ’23, Rowan Via ’23, Kathryn Altman ’24, and Aidan Bujanda-Moore ’23. Majors and minors among our student attendees included Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Education, Spanish, and Political Science.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, with co-authors Bonnie Henderson ’18 and Michael Gebhardt ’16, published a chapter, “Acrobatics in a Parametric Arena,” in Mathematics Research for the Beginning Student. The volume is part of the book series, Foundation for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (FURM), which is devoted to increasing access to undergraduate research opportunities. Parts of Gebhardt’s and Henderson’s Mathematics capstone projects supervised by Shelton were included in this chapter. Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean aided in data collection from video capture software generated by Henderson’s juggling of flower sticks in the fall of 2017. Research Assistants for this project included E. Wilson Cook ’22, Audrey Schumacher ’23, and Emily Thompson ’22.

• Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira engaged in a number of activities at the 2022 National Communication Association (NCA) Annual Convention in New Orleans. Moreira received the International and Intercultural Communication Division’s Best Book Award for Bitches Unleashed: Performance and Embodied Politics in Favela Funk. Additionally, she presented the following papers:

1. “Mestiçagem and Racial spatiality in Anitta’s ‘Girl from Rio,’” co-planned paper session with Texas AM’s Dr. Bryce Henderson and sponsored by the Critical and Cultural Studies Division.
2. “Dragging White Femininity: Pabllo Vittar’s Performances of Gender and Race on Instagram,” paper session sponsored by the GLBTQ Communication Studies Division.
3. “Communication Needs Transfeminismo: How a Brazilian Political and Epistemological Movement Can Help Decolonize Our Discipline,” presented in Portuguese for a multilingual panel about structural violence sponsored by NCA’s First Vice President.

Finally, Moreira participated as a panelist in the following:

1. “Spotlight on Scholarship: New Books in Latina/o/x Communication Studies,” sponsored by NCA’s First Vice President.
2. “Publishing Race Scholarship in Communication Studies: Challenges Faced by Scholars of Color and/or International Scholars in the Field,” sponsored by NCA’s First Vice President.
3. “Latinx Faculty: Finding our PLACE in Predominantly White Institutions,” sponsored by the La Raza Caucus.
4. “The Future of the La Raza Caucus: An Open Forum,” a session co-chaired with Dr. Michelle Holling and sponsored by the La Raza Caucus.
5. “Shared Governance as a Place for Advocacy: Examining How the Neoliberal University is Dismantling Community Deliberation,” sponsored by the Association for Communication Administration.

Associate Professor of Spanish Abby Dings and coauthor Tammy Jandrey Hertel of the University of Lynchburg presented at the Heritage Languages Special Interest Group panel of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) Annual Convention and World Languages Expo held November 18-20 in Boston, Massachusetts. Their talk, titled “Heritage Spanish Speakers’ Reflections on Their Study Abroad Experiences,” was based on a thematic analysis of follow-up interviews with a subset of participants who had completed their original survey. It explored how the participants’ heritage speaker status impacted their study abroad experiences.

Professor Emeritus of Music Lois Ferrari conducted the Austin Civic Orchestra in a performance of Prokofiev’s Peter and Wolf, narrated by Peter Bay, the Austin Symphony Orchestra conductor. Ferrari and Bay collaborated in the Austin Symphony Orchestra’s Pajama Party concert on November 12. Both orchestra and audience arrived in their pajamas and settled in for a unique take on the bedtime story.

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson presented “Feeling Climate Change in the Unruly Environment of Central Belize” for the roundtable “How Does Climate Change Feel? (Re)Thinking Cultural Embodied Responses To Environmental Precarity” at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, held November 9-13 in Seattle, Washington.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth earned a materials grant from the German Foreign Office and the German Academic Exchange Service, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). The grant covers a curated collection of German language titles for children and young adults, including picture books, graphic novels, non-fiction, and fiction. Students will use the collection to study media, narration, as well as representations of diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism in German literature for young audiences. Success with DAAD materials grants is made possible through Berroth’s work in community engagement as a DAAD Ortslektorin.

Computer science major Chris Ojonta ’23 attended the Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities in IT/Association for Computing Machinery (CMD-IT/ACM) Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, held September 7–10 in Washington, D.C. Ojonta received a full scholarship to support his attendance in recognition of his accomplishments in computer science. He interacted with numerous undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from a variety of backgrounds at the event and explored career and graduate school opportunities.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and education majors Leora Ammerman ’24, Logan Ferguson ’24, Caitlynne Graves ’24, Allison Hentges ’24, Kristin Lacy ’24, Rebecca Ramirez ’24, and William Slanina-Wertz ’24 presented “A Potpourri of Hands-on, Minds-on Lessons and Activities” at the Science Teachers Association of Texas annual Conference for the Advancement of Science Teaching (CAST) in Dallas.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave an invited talk titled “Geodesic Currents and the Boundary at Infinity” in the Geometry Seminar at George Mason University on Monday, November 14th.

Associate Director of Alumni Relations Becky Rodriguez has been selected to join the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors. Rodriguez graduated from the Chamber’s Leadership Georgetown program in May of 2022.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson published the article “Staying with the Trouble with Wilderness: Reworking Nature and Culture in the Plantationocene” in this fall’s issue of The Journal of Posthumanism. The issue is available here.

Associate Registrar Nadia Mahannah was appointed to a 4-year term on the Legislative Issues Committee within the Texas Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (TACRAO) at the TACRAO Annual Conference in November 2022. The committee closely follows higher education legislation at both the State and Federal levels to keep the TACRAO community informed of important changes impacting their institutions.

• In June of this year, Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made video recordings of works written for them. They are releasing them as the editing process is completed. The next video in this series, Atmósfera, is the first song from the cycle Sobre La Naturaleza by Diego Luzuriaga. The composer, originating from Ecuador, has a special affinity for writing music derived from traditional sources and connects deeply with themes from the natural world. The video can be viewed here.

Part-Time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky has been invited to be an adjudicator for a strings-cello audition for All-State Orchestra by TMEA (Texas Music Educator Association) on Saturday, November 12, 2022. She has continued coaching the Austin area’s top high school cellists. Two of her cello students have auditioned and won the first cello chairs for both Texas Region 26 and Region 32-All Region High School Orchestra this school year.

Assistant Professor of Education Raquel Sáenz Ortiz and two current students (co-researchers from SCOPE)— Rebecca Ramirez ’24 and Laura Carrasco Torres ’24— presented “Curricular imperialism: The impact of ‘anti-CRT’ legislation on Ethnic Studies classrooms in Texas” at the Critical Race Studies in Education Association (CRSEA) Annual Meeting, held October 26-28 in Edwardsville, Illinois.

Interim Vice President for Student Life Brit Katz co-presented “Leveraging Academic Affairs & Student Affairs Partnerships When Developing Student Leadership Programs” at the 2023 Southern Association of College Student Affairs Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, on November 6.

Associate professor of History Melissa Byrnes presented a paper entitled “Securing Thresholds: Housing, Family Size, and Alleged Delinquency” at the Western Society for French History Annual Conference in Victoria, British Columbia, on November 4.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth was the plenary keynote speaker at the 54th annual conference of the Tennessee World Language Teaching Association, “The Future of Languages is You: Learn and Share” in Franklin, Tennessee, on November 4–5, 2022. Berroth’s keynote address titled “Honoring Multilingualism and Linguistic Diversity as Ways of Belonging” introduced important questions related to language justice. Increased awareness about language justice contributes to creating inclusive multilingual spaces and includes challenging structures of power and privilege associated with languages, accents, or dialects. Berroth highlighted the benefits of empathy gained through learning multiple languages and through inhabiting multilingual spaces. The invited plenary keynote engaged a diverse audience. The conference convened educators from the Tennessee Classical Association, the Tennessee Association of Chinese Teachers, and the American Association of Teachers of French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby and two of his FSP research students— Domenic Cordova ’23 and Noah Pyles ’23 — attended the Great Plains Biomaterials Day in Lawrence, Kansas, on November 4, 2022. They presented two rapid-fire talks focused on developing a novel biomaterial ink for the blood-brain barrier and the fabrication of a low-cost Ender-3 bioprinter. Only 5 of the 35 submissions were selected for rapid-fire talks at the conference.

Associate Professor of History Jessica S. Hower recorded an episode for the “Not Just the Tudors” Podcast, hosted by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. In the episode, Hower’s co-author, Valerie Schutte, and Hower discussed their two-book edited collection, Mary I in Writingand Writing Mary I, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan earlier this year, and the fraught history and memory of England’s first crowned queen regnant more generally. “Not Just the Tudors” has been running since April 2021 and has had over 6 million downloads. The episode is available here.

Professor of Biology and 2022 London Faculty Romi Burks gave an invited presentation on October 22 on chocolate education entitled “Making the word chocolate mean more to everyone” at the first edition of the Latin American International Festival of Chocolate and Cocoa in Europe. This event took place in partnership with The Chocolate Story Museum and WOW/Vinte Vinte at their location in the cultural district in Vila Nova de Gaia in Porto, Portugal. During the following week (October 26-27), Burks participated as an invited judge for filled chocolates at The Academy of Chocolate awards back in London.

Professors of Biology Maria Cuevas and Maria Todd published a paper titled “Microarray Analysis Reveals Overexpression of both Integral Membrane and Cytosolic Tight Junction Genes in Endometrial Cancer Cell Lines” in the Journal of Cancer. The study reports for the first time a comprehensive analysis of 84 tight junction network genes in a panel of endometrial cancer cell lines. The authors identified three genes that were consistently deregulated in endometrial cancer, thus providing potential candidates for the development of both diagnostic markers and novel therapeutic approaches for endometrial cancer.

Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar published an article titled “Trauma Remains: The Material Afterlives of the 1989 Alton School Bus Crash,” in the October 2022 issue of the Journal of Material Culture. The article analyzes the ways a large roadside shrine in South Texas where 21 middle and high school students were killed in a crash in 1989 continues to quietly but forcefully reverberate as a site of collective trauma more than thirty years later.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder and her co-author Karine Moe published the lead essay “So You are Going to Be a New CAO: Strategies for Success” in the fall edition of The ACAD Leader sponsored by the American Council of Academic Deans.

Director of A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs serves as a book reviewer for  Choice Magazine .  Choice Magazine  is a publication focused on evaluating research for academic use. Two new reviews have been published, including “Ethics in Higher Education” and “Passing for Perfect” by Erin Khue Ninh.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and Associate Professor and Chair of Education Alicia Moore presented “New Kids in the Blocks: Pedagogical Models of Play for Social Justice” at the International Play Association-USA Annual Conference in San Antonio, Texas.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 was the mezzo-soprano soloist in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “All Night Vigil” with the Texas Bach Festival, under the direction of Dr. Barry Williamson on June 23 and 26 in Georgetown and Austin. The work consists of 15 movements with a capella chorus and soloists, sung in Church Slavonic/Russian. The “All Night Vigil” is one of Rachmaninoff’s finest compositions, considered “the greatest musical achievement of the Russian Orthodox Church.” Watch the performance here. 

A wonderful interdisciplinary group from Southwestern participated in the 17th Annual Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC), held this year at the University of Texas at Austin on October 29. Carson Vogel ’23 presented “Modeling Heat Transfer.” This project is a continuation of the 2021 and 2022 SCOPE projects under the supervision of Professor of Physics Steven Alexander and Associate Professor of Physics Mark Bottorf. This work is part of ongoing efforts for the eventual development of a solar energy storage cell; a problem brought to Southwestern by Coordinator of Science Facilities and Equipment Oscar Lee Fellows. Melanie Richey ’23 presented “Rats on the Run: Modeling of Hippocampal Cell Activity Using Plasticity.” Her project is a continuation of a 2022 Research Experience for Undergraduates at Southern Methodist University under the supervision of Dr. Katie Hedrick in collaboration with Dr. Brad E. Pfeiffer, Department of Neuroscience, UT Southwestern Medical Center. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton also attended the conference. Marr chaired a student presentation session. Shelton supervised Vogel’s and Richey’s current work, preliminary results for their mathematics capstone projects. Jillian Reese ’23 and Emma Lewis ’23 joined with their counterparts from the University of North Texas-Denton in research with Shelton and Dr. Joe Iaia, funded through the Council for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. Other students also attended: Oliver Johnson ’23, Jess Kazmir ’23, Lauren Calzado ’23, Rowan Via ’23, Kathryn Altman ’24, and Aidan Bujanda-Moore ’23. Majors and minors among our student attendees included Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Education, Spanish, and Political Science.

On October 20th, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the speaker at the  University of Toronto’s Department of Mathematics Equity Forum in a talk she called “Abstracting  People out of Mathematics.” The goal of the Equity Forum is to create a space and time that  invites people to think about underserved students, marginalized colleagues, and postdocs, take  a serious look at the mathematical culture we promote and propagate to math majors, graduate  students, and colleagues. In particular, Sawyer spoke about how math culture and community are  harmful to us and the ways that we are still perpetuating the harm that was done to us. The  conversation focused on and reminded the audience that people will always be more important  than math.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled, “‘Sole Hope of Caesar’s  Side’: Humanism and History in the Reign of Mary I and Philip II,” at the Northeast Conference on  British Studies annual gathering, which took place in a hybrid format at Bates College and online  October 21-23.

In June of this year, Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made videorecordings of works written for them and are releasing them as the editing process is completed.The next video in this series is a song from the River of Words Song Cycle entitled Mariquita,featuring music by Diego Vega, and text by Yutzel Garcia.

Director of the A. Frank Smith Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs was a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign during the IS510 Libraries, Information, and Society  class. Her lecture was focused on the events currently happening regarding censorship and material challenges in libraries. The class was given the opportunity to ask questions and explore  academic librarianship in private higher education.

Director of the A. Frank Smith Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs gave a presentation titled, “Show  me the data: Teaching new librarians how to find institutional data for analysis,” for the Midwest  Data Librarian Symposium held October 5-7th, hosted by Purdue University and Notre Dame. The presentation focused on mentorship and institutional training to provide new personnel  context and understanding of collections and data capture in an academic library.

Assistant Professor of Art Ana Esteve Llorens’ work was included in an exhibition at the international art fair Estampa 2022, held October 13–16 in Madrid, Spain. Organized by Set Espaid’ Art Gallery, the exhibition was a reflection on contemporary geometry and abstraction and it featured the work of five women artists. The gallery was awarded with the prize for the best stand. A large piece of Esteve Llorens was included. This work was produced over the summer partially thanks to the Faculty Competitive Award Esteve Llorens received for this academic year.

Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby and four of his FSP research students— Kristie  Cheng ’23, Domenic Cordova ’23, Noah Pyles ’23, and Angel Rodriguez ’24— attended the 2022  Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Annual Meeting, held October 12-15 in San Antonio, Texas. They presented two posters focused on the development of a novel biomaterial ink for the  blood-brain barrier and the fabrication of a low-cost Ender-3 bioprinter. Both posters were  well-attended by other conference-goers and generated some insightful and helpful discussions.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth was invited to contribute to a podcast series sponsored by Literaturhaus Heilbronn, Germany, which was published on October 14, 2022. The podcast series is titled “Warum Kleist?” (Why Kleist?) and features responses from international Kleist scholars. Contemporary German language authors compete for the annual award of the Kleist-Preis in honor of one of Germany’s most remarkable language artists, Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811). Berroth’s research includes a book on Kleist and work on several Kleist-Preis awardees. The podcast episode can be accessed here.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a presentation at the 25th anniversary conference of the African American Art Song Alliance at the University of California, Irvine. Titled “A Ghost No More: On a Prize-Winning Song by Margaret Bonds No Longer Lost,” Cooper’s talk centered on Bonds’s setting of Frank Dempster Sherman’s poem “A Sea Ghost,” which she composed at the age of eighteen and for which she won a prestigious prize of $250 (about $5,400 in 2022 dollars) in the national Wanamaker Competition in 1932. The song has frequently been described as lost, but Cooper discovered it in the course of his archival research. By examining it and the political campaign song “We’re All for Hoover Today” (written when Bonds was fifteen), putting those two into a focused chronology with the flowering of mature song that emerged in mid-1932, and examining the previously unknown correspondence of the composer, Cooper shed light on the nature and potency of the otherwise unseen but powerfully felt encounter that enabled Bonds to grow by a decade or more as a composer in a matter of mere months. For those who are wondering, it is totally and truthfully coincidental that Cooper, who has an aversion to cheesy promotional stunts, gave a talk about ghosts and phantom voices two weeks before Halloween.

Associate Professor of Theatre and Associate Dean of the Faculty Sergio Costola presented a paper titled “Lucrezia Borgia and Theatrical Practice of Women in Elite Society” at a conference on Memory and Performance. Classical Reception in Early Modern Festivals sponsored by the Archive for Performances of Greek and Roman Drama of the University of Oxford, England (Parma, Italy, October 13-14, 2022).

Associate Professor of Theatre and Associate Dean of the Faculty Sergio Costola presented a paper titled “The Battle of Polesella (1509). Diplomatic Relations and the Performing Arts” at the 10th Splendid Encounters Conference, Beyond the Truth. Misinformation and Credibility in Early Modern Diplomacy (Florence, Italy, October 12-14, 2022).

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones was invited as the inaugural lecturer of the First-Year Experience lecture series at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio on October 12. Berrones’s talk drew from his own research and career trajectory to reflect on the role of the liberal arts in education, the value of interdisciplinary study, and a commitment to lifelong learning.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum and the Texas Alpha chapter of Alpha Chi National College Honor Society were awarded the prestigious designation of Notable Chapter for the 2021–2022 academic year. This award acknowledges Schrum and Texas Alpha’s high level of involvement and Southwestern’s commitment to and support for Alpha Chi’s high academic standards and their mission to make scholarship effective for good. Schrum ensured that multiple benchmarks of exemplary chapter health were met and exceeded.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s first-ever performance of the two violin concertos of Florence B. Price (1887–1953). In Prince’s life, most White stages banned Black audience members, White orchestras had no Black performers, White orchestras rarely performed classical music by Black composers, and standing Black orchestras that could handle difficult concertos, Florence Price had to know that the chances of these two powerful compositions (1931 and 1951) being performed were virtually nil – and yet she wrote them. Now, though, 67 years after their composer’s death, they have finally been performed by one of the world’s greatest orchestras. Cooper’s program notes supplement their abstruse analytical comments on Price’s violin concertos with reflections on Price’s complex and deft negotiations of White and Black performance spaces and music in these two compositions.

Director of the A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs and Head of Special Collections & Archives Megan Firestone attended the Queer Histories South Conference and presented information on Southwestern University’s archive during the conference information sharing expo. This event includes archives, libraries, historians, and leaders focused on promoting LBGTQ archiving and history in the South.

Head of Special Collections Megan Firestone was awarded the Texas Library Association College and University Libraries Division stipend to support her attendance at the TALL Texans Leadership Development Institute.

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone was an invited speaker at the September 29 Texas State University Department of History Senior Seminar, where she was part of a panel titled “What can I do with a History Degree?”

Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson traveled with three students who worked with and were mentored by Assistant Professor of Anthropology Naomi Reed this summer through SCOPE to represent Southwestern at the Universities Studying Slavery Fall 2022 Conference, held September 28–October 1 in Charlottesville, Virginia. Southwestern’s panel was titled “Revealing Race and Exploring White Dominance at a Small Liberal Arts School: How Southwestern University Confronts (Ignores?) Its White Supremacist Foundations.” Johnson presented a paper coauthored with Reed titled “An Overview of the Southwestern University Racial History Project”; Maria (Cony) Cameron ’24 presented “Exploring Policy and Racial Climate”; Aspen Coriz-Romero ’24 presented “Building Communities of Care and Organizing Resistance at Southwestern University”; and Kellie Henderson ’23 presented “Early Life of Black Students and Faculty on Southwestern University Campus.” The panel was well attended, and attendees (primarily faculty) were very impressed with the students.

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury released a video recording of “Juntos Frente al Mar,” the third and last song from the cycle  De Amor y Desventura  by Julio César Oliva. The video is available on YouTube .

Associate Professors of Music David Asbury and Bruce Cain performed their program titled “Canciones por la Vida” as part of the guest artist series at Kalamazoo College on September 29. This program contains many songs commissioned by the duo in the last 11 years, primarily on environmental themes.

Associate Professor of Feminst Studies Brenda Sendejo was invited to present her research as part of Mexic-Arte Museum’s  Chicano/a Art Movimiento y Más en Austen, Tejas 1960s to 1980s  exhibit and lecture series. Her paper was titled “The Chicana Movement in Austin: A Legacy of Activism, Feminism, and Intergenerational Encuentros” and drew on themes from the exhibit that intersect with Sendejo’s work on the Chicana/o movement and emergence of Chicana feminist thought in Texas. The lecture series and exhibit were supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Professor of English Michael Saenger published a pamphlet with the Academic Engagement Network titled Finding Common Ground: A Strategy for Combating the Anti-Israel Movement in the U.S. Academy

Dean of Enrollment Services Christine Bowman presented at the 2022 National Association for College Admission Counseling Conference, held September 22–24 in Houston, Texas. Bowman joined a team of admission and independent consulting professionals for a session titled “Independent Educational Consulting in 2022: Challenging Myths and Stereotypes.”

Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony, Alejandro Medina ’24, and Mark Mueller ’24 participated in the 19th International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering, held virtually September 25–28. Medina presented the group’s paper titled “Prioritizing Self, Team, or Job: Trends in Sincerity in Cooperative Polls.”

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth hosted the annual fall meeting of the South Texas Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German on September 24 at Southwestern. An enthusiastic group of 20 educators from graduate programs, high schools, colleges, and universities convened to learn and share in a workshop on integrated performance assessments (IPAs). Research confirms that use of IPAs leads to higher proficiency in students, as demonstrated, for example, by improved performance on Advanced Placement exams or other national assessments. The full-day workshop offered professional development opportunities for German teachers who often are the lone teacher in their subject at their institutions. Jennifer Christianson ’99 and current adjunct faculty member in Southwestern’s German Program Erin Osterhaus ’09 participated in the workshop. Osterhaus is currently implementing the cutting-edge curriculum for first-year German.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth participated in a three-day seminar titled “The Medical Humanities in German Studies” at the 46th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, held September 15–18 in Houston, Texas. The seminar brought together 19 scholars who shared, analyzed, and interrogated current research at the intersection of medical humanities and German studies. In reading and discussing each other’s work, participants not only discovered cutting-edge scholarship, but also engaged in discussions about how a medical humanities research approach sheds new light on Germanophone culture, literature, language, and history. Berroth’s contribution focused on representations of mental health in German language migration and identity narratives. Her research contributes to the courses she lists with Southwestern’s interdisciplinary health studies minor.

Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarco was an invited speaker at the September 23 Baylor University Department of Biology Seminar, where she presented her research titled “From Transect to Landscape: Evaluating the Role of Wet Meadow Restoration in Climate Change Mitigation and Resilience

Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarco was awarded a research grant in the amount of $40,000 from the Bureau of Land Management for her proposed research titled “Nature Climate Solutions: Evaluating the Role of Wet Meadow Restoration in Climate Change Mitigation and Resilience.”

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published virtually three translations of primary sources from and on the Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing, a school that thrived in Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with other translations on reproduction, abortion, and obstetrics from Mexico and Brazil, the translations are part of the new “Advanced Topic: Reproductive Histories” section of the History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean (HOSLAC) archive hosted by the University of New Hampshire. The contributors’ goal is to create a repository of primary sources accessible in their original format, transcribed in their original language, and translated into English to teach reproductive histories to undergraduate and graduate students. The new section is available on the HOSLAC website along with Hernández Berrones’s three translations: “Handbook from Nursing and Obstetrics School (1920),” “Three Clinical Histories (1929–1931),” and “Report on Nursing and Obstetrics School (1936).”

Associate Professors of Music David Asbury and Bruce Cain have released the second in their series of video recordings made in the summer of 2022. The recording is the second movement of the song cycle  De Amor y Desventura  written for the duo in 2017 by Julio César Oliva and is titled “Un Grito de Dolor.” The video is available on YouTube .

Professor of Art Star Varner and Instructor of Applied Music Katherine Altobello ’99 were among the many local artists, actors, and musicians who donated their talents at the Heart for Ukraine concert and art sale, held April 21 at St. Martin’s Lutheran Church in Austin. Varner donated an original animal drawing, while Altobello performed the iconic Rodgers and Hammerstein song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” alongside pianist Rick Rowley. This event raised more than $40,000, with all proceeds going to charities currently on the ground in Ukraine, including SeaStar Kids, Doctors Without Borders, and Lutheran World Relief. A video of the concert is available on YouTube.

Associate Professor of Business Debika Sihi was named one of three finalists in the Marketing Management Association’s (MMA’s) Teaching Innovation Competition at the 2022 MMA Fall Educators’ Conference, held September 21–23 in San Antonio, Texas. She also chaired a panel on adapting existing curriculum to include more data-driven projects/cases.

Professor of English Michael Saenger published a review of  Hamlet Translations: Prisms of Cultural Encounters across the Globe , edited by Márta Minier and Lily Kahn. The review appeared in  Translation Studies,  a leading international academic journal.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Emily Tesmer ’20, and Breely Peterson ’20 published an article titled “Confronting Politics: The Role of Conflict Orientation in Shaping Political Debate” in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor presented her work “Uncivil Boundaries: Contesting the Civility of Protestors and Political Elites” at the 2022 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition, held September 15–18 in Montreal, Canada. She also served as a panel chair and discussant for several papers on incivility in American politics and presented the best dissertation award.

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury made video recordings of works by Federico Garcia Lorca, Jason Hoogerhyde, Diego Luzuriaga, Eduardo Martin, Julio César Oliva, and Diego Vega. The first of these recordings is titled “Encuentro” and is the first movement of a song cycle entitled  De Amor y Desventura  by Julio César Oliva. The video is available on YouTube .

Associate Professors of Music Bruce Cain and David Asbury were invited to perform at the Cheboygan Opera House in Cheboygan, Michigan, at the Heart of the Turtle Gathering in Mackinaw City, Michigan, and as part of the guest artist series at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Charlevoix, Michigan, in May 2022. The programs for these concerts featured works on environmental themes written for the duo by composers Matthew Dunne, Jason Hoogerhyde, Diego Luzuriaga, Eduardo Martin, Julio César Oliva, and Diego Vega.

Associate Professor of Feminist Studies Brenda Sendejo was elected chair of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), a professional organization for self-identified Chicana, Latina, Native American/indígena mujeres and gender nonconforming academics, students, and activists. Sendejo cochaired the program committee for the MALCS 2022 Summer Institute, held July 27–30 in Fort Collins, Colorado. She also organized and served as a presenter on a roundtable about healing and re-membering as decolonial feminist praxis, informed by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Assistant Professor of History Joseph Hower moderated a conversation with Peniel E. Joseph of the University of Texas at Austin at Lark & Owl Booksellers in Georgetown on his new book  The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century. 

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth was a member of the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) Working Group: Inclusive Assessment Practices for Flexibility, Rigor, and Equity in summer 2022. Berroth delivered a presentation on her experience and expertise in using transparency in teaching and learning (TILT) methodology. The working group’s resources are available on the ACS website.

The work of Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ana Esteve Llorens was included in an exhibition at the international art fair BAD+ 2022, held July 7–10 in Bordeaux, France. Organized by Set Espai d’Art Gallery, the exhibition featured the work of three artists. Two of Esteven Lloren’s sculptures and one installation were included.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ana Esteve Llorens presented a new sculptural installation at Women & Their Work in Austin, Texas, from June 4 to August 4. The piece, titled “Measuring Device,” is a structure fabricated mainly of steel combined with other materials, including cotton, rope, and wood. Designed by introducing and relating measurements taken from inhabited spaces, body proportions, and scaled dimensions of Esteve Llorens’s studio, the abstract sculpture defines an objective reference to connect body and space.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Art Ana Esteve Llorens presented an exhibition of new work at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas, Texas, from May 21 to August 6. The exhibition, titled Possibility of Line, featured woven textiles created over the past two years. In 2015, Esteve Llorens began working with yarns and weaving techniques encountered while living and traveling throughout Mexico and combining them with those of her native Spain. Since then, she has continued to research and enact the sculptural possibilities of fibers.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis and Shana Norton, otherwise known as the flute and harp duo Chaski, will present “Most Importantly,” a recital of music that explores the things that really matter, with soprano Maureen Broy Papovich and pianist Jeanne Dayton Sasaki. The recital’s centerpiece is the premiere of the song cycle “Most Importantly, Loves” (2021) by Inglis. The performance will be October 2 at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Austin, Texas.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth visited with Anton Knittel, director of Literaturhaus Heilbronn in Germany, and contributed to the organization’s podcast Warum Kleist? (Why Kleist?),  a collection of scholarly voices on the German poet and writer Heinrich von Kleist, who was the subject of one of her books.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth gave a research presentation at the International Conference of Teachers of German (Internationale Tagung der Deutschlehrerinnen und Deutschlehrer), held August 15–20 in Vienna, Austria. Berroth’s paper, titled “Bilderbuch-Didaktik: Das Potential Anspruchsvoller Bilderbücher für Literarästhetisches und Sprachliches Lernen im Diversitätsorientierten Unterricht,” was part of the “Visuelles Lernen mit Bildern, Filmen und Bild-Text-Verbindungen” section. Berroth provided context and examples for antiracist pedagogies in German studies with authentic materials from early childhood education, analyzing the visual language of representations of difference in illustrated books for young readers.

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano published an article titled “A Three-Pronged Approach for Teaching Psychology Students to Understand and Avoid Plagiarism” in Teaching of Psychology.

Professor of Biology and Lillian Nelson Pratt Chair Ben Pierce published a paper titled “Relative Tail Width as an Indicator of Body Condition in Central Texas Eurycea Salamanders” in the August 2022 issue of  Herpetological Conservation and Biology. 

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer coauthored a paper titled “Unique Equilibrium States for Geodesic Flows on Flat Surfaces with Singularities” that has been accepted for publication by International Mathematics Research Notices.  The paper, written with Dave Constantine of Wesleyan University, Benjamin Call of the University of Illinois Chicago , Alena Erchenko of the University of Chicago , and Grace Work of the University of Illinois, is the result of three years of work that was partly sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Amy Rebecca King organized a panel titled “Mixed-Asian Casting” for the 2022 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Annual Conference, held July 28–31 in Detroit, Michigan. Even though multicultural people make up the fastest-growing demographic in America, they are underrepresented in the media. This panel explored the issues that multicultural actors, specifically mixed-Asian actors, experience in the casting industry. King, along with her colleagues Reiko Aylesworth (Southern Methodist University) and Robert Torigoe (University of Hawaii), gathered interviews with actor Amy Hill, casting director Victor Vazquez, and editor-in-chief of Mixed Asian Media Alex Chester and explored the experiences of mixed-Asian actors, as well as the difficulties of casting according to race in film/TV, theatre, and media. The session was very well attended, and the first-time panelists have been invited back to present at next year’s conference.

Director of the A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs graduated from Texas A&M University–Commerce on August 13 with her doctorate in education. She successfully defended her dissertation, titled  Collaborative Relationships: Effective Partnerships between Librarians, Student Affairs, and Faculty,  this past April.

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone discussed the collection “Identifying Voters: The Persuasive Force of Campaign Memorabilia” at the Texas Digital Library’s Digital Collections Summer Love-In, held virtually July 27.

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone presented a session titled “Digital Humanities for STEM Students: Interdisciplinary Discovery, Connecting Liberal Arts and Sciences” at the STEM Librarians South 2022 Conference, held virtually July 28–29.

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone has been accepted to the Texas Library Association’s TALL Texans leadership program. This prestigious program is highly competitive and accepts only a limited number of librarians each year.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper wrote the program notes for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s upcoming performance of both violin concertos by Florence B. Price, scheduled to take place November 6–9 with soloist Randall Goosby under the baton of Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Price wrote both concertos in an age where most white halls barred Black audience members, most white stages banned Black performers, and no white orchestras included any Black players; she had to know there was virtually no chance of the concertos being performed with orchestra during her lifetime. And indeed they were not: the Second Concerto, written just 13 months before her death, was premiered with piano three years after her passing, performed one more time, and then forgotten, and there is no evidence that the First Concerto was ever performed. Both works were lost until their manuscripts were found in an abandoned house south of Chicago in 2009. They were first performed in 2018 and are now in the repertoire of one of the world’s greatest orchestras.

Assistant Professor of English Rebecca Evans published a reflection on teaching Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower as part of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Zoom In pedagogy series.

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe recently reviewed two books for the  American Journal of Archaeology : Oplontis: Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy, Volume 2: The Decorations: Painting, Stucco, Pavements, Sculptures ,  edited by John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser, and  Archaeological Exploration of Sardis Report 7: The Temple of Artemis at Sardis  by Fikret K. Yegül (review to be published in January 2023). The two books represent two radically different approaches to current high-quality archaeological publication. The first is completely digital and lavishly illustrated beyond the normal means of hard-copy publication, while the second is a very traditional hard copy with plates, also lavishly illustrated with line drawings by the author. Clarke and Howe currently lead the excavations of the two largest villas in the Bay of Naples (Stabiae and Oplontis), and Clarke and Muntasser have both lectured at Southwestern. Howe began his archaeological career in 1980 at Sardis and made a few short contributions that Yegül generously credits with having clarified the controversial issue of the chronology of the Artemis temple.

Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala were invited to speak on a parent-education panel for Child’s Day, a child development center in Austin, on the topic of talking to children about race. The well-attended panel, which featured K–12 educators and organizers, continued Moore’s and Bahrainwala’s public-education efforts on inclusion work.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala received the 2022 Fellows’ Early Career Award from the Rhetoric Society of America. This award is presented each year to a scholar who has contributed significant, innovative, boundary-expanding research to the discipline. The nomination pool included tenured and associate professors and typically goes to scholars at research-leading institutions.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was the first guest speaker in the 2022 University of Arizona Choral Studies Distinguished Speakers Series. Titled “The Africans, Who Are a Part of My Ancestry, Say …’: Voices of Heritage in the ‘Credo’ and Spirituals of Margaret Bonds,” Cooper’s video lecture includes a significant amount of newly discovered archival evidence as well as readings by Candace Kerr Johnson (University of California, Berkeley) and performances by Grammy-winning chorus Conspirare and acclaimed soprano Karen Slack accompanied by Michelle Cann. A previously unknown exchange of letters between Bonds, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Sam Fox Music Publishing provides unusually direct smoking-gun evidence of the music-publishing industry using its economic leverage to ensure that Bonds’s musical affirmation of Black folk and the Black ancestral heritage would be silenced.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper published three new editions of music by Margaret Bonds as part of Hildegard Publishing Company’s Margaret Bonds Signature Series: the Afro-modernist “African Dance” for soprano, baritone, and piano (text by Langston Hughes); “Especially Do I Believe in the Negro Race” for soprano, chorus, and piano (the second movement of Bonds’s setting of the W. E. B. Du Bois prose poem “Credo”); and, most significantly, The Montgomery Variations, a 23-minute orchestral work that offers a series of snapshots of the civil rights movement from the Montgomery bus boycott to the 16th-Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, followed by a radiant “benediction” in which, according to Bonds, “a benign God, father and mother to all people, pours forth His love on His children—the good and the bad alike.” Released on a rental basis in 2020, the variations have been recorded by the Minnesota Orchestra and were featured at this summer’s Brevard Music Center Summer Festival in North Carolina. This study score is a full scholarly edition that will make the works available to individuals and libraries as well as performing groups.

Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Maha Zewail-Foote were awarded a grant from the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) to create a unique virtual cross-institutional faculty mentoring program for early-career faculty of color (FOC) called FOC CONNECT. The program will connect early-career faculty of color with senior faculty from other ACS institutions. Through this program, early-career faculty of color will receive mentorship and support. The program will also provide training for selected senior faculty mentors.

Associate Professor of Kinesiology Ed Merritt and collaborators published a paper titled “Prolonged Cycling Lowers Subsequent Running Mechanical Efficiency in Collegiate Triathletes” in the journal  BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation.  The paper details a study that explored the physiologic and biomechanical changes that occur in running after cycling.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented research titled “The Isoperimetric Problem on the Number Line with a Log-Concave Density” at MathFest, a conference hosted by the Mathematical Association of America, held August 3–6 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Director of Organic Chemistry Labs Carmen Velez and Director of General Chemistry Labs Dilani Koswatta attended the 2022 Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, held July 31–August 4 at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Velez presented her research titled “Culturally Relevant and Socially Responsible Design of Organic Chemistry Laboratory Curriculum.”

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published the chapter “Healers and Doctors: A History of the Healing Occupations in Mexico” in the book Healthcare in Latin America: History, Society, Culture,  edited by David S. Dalton and Douglas J. Weatherford (University of Florida Press, 2022). From the perspective of medical pluralism, this chapter takes an innovative historiographical approach to trace the healing professions in the history of Mexico. The pluralistic nature of Mexican medicine has been a reality since colonial times, yet medical professionals disqualified healers with non- or limited academic background as unscientific, unreliable, and even criminals. If historians of medicine in Mexico writing in the first half of the 20th century admired the professionalization of medicine and made it the center of their narratives, late 20th-century historians questioned the utility of a process that privileged physicians and limited the scope of narratives to one form of health care. Structured with the periods and categories of the history of biomedicine to help readers compare with other national contexts, the chapter shows how the complex relationships among a wide array of health providers, government administrations, and historical frameworks shaped new and varied forms of healthcare provision that adapted to the social, cultural, and political landscape.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum had an article appear on IEEE Xplore in advance of being published in IEEE Transactions on Games. The article, titled “Hybrid Encoding for Generating Large Scale Game Level Patterns with Local Variations,” represents a long collaboration with coauthors Sebastian Risi and Vanessa Volz that started at the 2019 Schloss Dagstuhl seminar Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: Revolutions in Computational Game AI. The following summer, Schrum’s SCOPE students Kirby Steckel ’21 and Benjamin Capps ’22 made significant contributions to the project, which led to their inclusion as coauthors of the article. The article explains a novel technique for generating video game levels based on available training data and high-level patterns. A preprint of the article is available online.

Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean presented as a poster research titled “Effect of Block Design on Rotational Characteristics of a Swim Start” at the 2022 International Society of Biomechanics in Sports Annual Conference, held July 19–23 in Liverpool, England. He conducted the research with his SCOPE students, Sam Anderson ’23, Riley Barlage ’23, and C. P. Shaulis ’22.

Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean and his SCOPE research students—C. P. Shaulis ’22, Sam Anderson ’23, and Riley Barlage ’23—presented their research titled “Lower Extremity Muscle Activity When Walking on a Non-Motorized Treadmill” at the 2022 American College of Sports Medicine Annual Meeting and World Congress, held May 31–June 4 in San Diego, California.

Professor of Spanish Katy Ross presented a paper titled “La Adopción Internacional en La Adopción de Daniela Féjerman” at the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cine Españoles Siglo XXI annual conference, held July 12–15 in Oviedo, Spain.

Professor of Psychology Fay Guarraci coauthored an article with Layla Avendano ’22, Isabel Candelario ’21, Cler Estoesta ’22, Brooke Frohock ’21, Kate Davis ’20, Megan Kelly ’23, Matt Oevermann ’21, Bernard Sencherey ’22, Erin Toro ’21, and Hannah Valdivia ’22 that was accepted for publication by Physiology & Behavior.The project, titled “Daily GnRH Agonist Treatment Effectively Delayed Puberty in Female Rats without Long-Term Effects on Sexual Behavior or Estrous Cyclicity,” was supported by a grant from the American Psychological Foundation. Part of the work also was supported by SCOPE funding.

A new research project by Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarco was featured in the newspaper Summit Daily, which serves the Summit County, Colorado, area. The article, titled “Copper Mountain Resort Begins 10-Year Carbon Sequestration Study,” highlighted the collaboration between Southwestern University, the Copper Mountain ski resort, and Peak Ecological Services, LLC, to investigate the impact of ski slope restoration as a nature climate solution.  

Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarco and Southwestern students Gabrielle Garza ’22, Guadalupe Sanchez ’23, and Christine Vanginault ’23 attended a conservation summit held July 27 at the Copper Mountain ski resort in Colorado. DeMarco and her collaborators—Jeff Grasser, efficiency manager at Copper Mountain, and Rea Orthner, botanist/ecologist with Peak Ecological Services, LLC—presented their research project titled “Ski Slope Restoration as a Nature Climate Solution.” The goal of the summit was to enhance collaboration and provide an opportunity for resort operators, land managers, and researchers to share innovative methods for enhancing the conservation of local ecosystems impacted by recreation.

Professor of Education Michael Kamen presented “Bottom Up Professional Development for WILD Facilitators with the Lesson Study Model” at the virtual 2022 Texas Project WILD Facilitator Forum, held July 21–22 through the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton co-led a four-day virtual workshop, “Modeling Inspiration for Differential Equations,” for 25 faculty participants through the Mathematical Association of America’s Online Professional Enhancement and Capacity Building for Instructional Practices in Undergraduate Mathematics (OPEN Math) program, which is funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF). The group was invited to apply to organize a workshop based on its previous work in an NSF grant. 

For the first time in three years, Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe conducted a field season at the ancient Roman villas of Stabiae. Small teams from the University of Maryland, the University of Akron, and Cornell University joined Howe and Southwestern student Oliver Johnson ’23 in digitally recording the architecture of one of the villas (Villa Airanna). Software engineer Sean Cahall began work with Howe and others to establish a GIS database, perhaps to be maintained by another university in a full field season next year. Howe is working on a major restructuring of the managing scientific committee involving some dozen European and American universities. 

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin participated in a conference titled “Critical Margins. Politicizing the Crisis” sponsored by the European Sociological Association Research Network 25 on Social Movements, the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Participation and Mobilization, the University of Trento Department of Sociology and Social Research, and the University of Trento Research Group on Collective Action, Change, and Transition. Selbin presented a paper titled “Revolution as Idea and Practice Today,” chaired a session titled “Reactions to Collective Actions,” and served as a discussant for the panel “Constructing and Displaying Collective Identities.” The conference was held June 15–17 in Trento, Italy.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katharine Aha presented a paper titled “Diverse Yet Durable? Interethnic Coalitions and Government Formation” as part of a panel on government formation, stability, and responsiveness at the 2022 European Political Science Association Annual Conference, held June 23–25 in Prague, Czech Republic. She also served as chair and discussant for a panel on party competition and the environment. 

Dean of Enrollment Services Christine Bowman gave three presentations at the 2022 Higher Education Consultants Association Annual Conference, held June 13–17 in Denver, Colorado. She delivered a pre-conference case study on financial aid, a session titled “Succeed in Business Without a Business Major,” and another session titled “Test Optional: College and IEC Perspectives.” Ed Burger, former president of Southwestern, gave the plenary address.

Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Mike Gesinski and four of his SCOPE research students—Nathaniel Blake ’24, Michelle Nguyen ’23, Yaz Sebastiany ’24, and Chelsey Southwell ’24—attended the 47th National Organic Chemistry Symposium, held June 26–30 in San Diego, California. They met with scientific leaders from academia and the pharmaceutical industry, including three Nobel laureates, and presented three posters. Nguyen was awarded best poster for her presentation titled “Titanium-Mediated Synthesis of Cyclobutanones.”

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder presented a paper titled “Leadership in Crisis: Comparing Prime Minister Abe’s and Chancellor Merkel’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic” with coauthor Sarah Wiliarty of Wesleyan University at the 28th International Conference of Europeanists, held June 29–July 1 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower presented a paper titled “‘An Empire of Itself’: Constructing and Contesting Imperial Kingship in the Early Modern World” at the 2022 Kings & Queens Conference, held June 29–July 2 via hybrid format at Nantes University in France. The conference, which was sponsored by the Royal Studies Network at the University of Winchester in England and the Center for Research on International and Atlantic History at Nantes University, focused on the theme “Monarchy and Empire.” 

Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller gave an invited talk in Chinese on June 11 titled “秦汉彩绘青铜器:材质、装饰工艺与价值” (“Painted Bronzes of the Qin and Han: Materials, Decorative Techniques, and Value”) at the virtual conference 制器尚象 (Making Artifacts by Modeling Images), hosted by the Chinese National Academy of Arts (中国艺术研究院) in Beijing, China. The conference title derives from a phrase in the Book of Changes, which discusses emblematic figures as archetypes for artifacts. Miller presented on a panel titled “Craft and Form.”

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual lecture titled “‘So Sind Wird Nun Botschafter’: Der Gemeingut Mendelssohns und Wagners als Repräsentanten Deutscher Kultur in England” (“‘So Now We Are Ambassadors’: The Common Ground between Mendelssohn and Wagner as Representatives of German Culture to England”) for a conference titled Mendelssohn und Wagner: Zwei Leitfiguren der Leipziger Musikgeschichte (Mendelssohn and Wagner: Two Leading Figures of Leipzig’s Musical History) hosted by the University of Leipzig. Cooper was one of only two U.S. scholars in the program. His paper showed that although Mendelssohn and Wagner are commonly understood as absolute antipodes in 19th century music, they followed parallel strategies in a shared mission of musical diplomacy for expanding and enriching the musical life of England via recent and historical contributions of German composers. 

Director of Student Inclusion and Diversity Malissa Ismaila was the keynote speaker at the Georgetown Cultural Citizen Memorial Association (GCCMA) 70th Juneteenth Celebration on June 18.

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower organized the Britain and the World 2022 Conference at the University of Plymouth in England, held June 14–17. The conference welcomed nearly 150 interdisciplinary scholars from across the globe for three full days of papers, plenaries, and roundtables on Britain’s relationship with the wider world from the 16th century to the present. In addition to evaluating abstracts, coordinating the program, and helping lead things on the ground, Hower presented a paper, “Patrons of Empire: Mary I, Philip II, and the Broadening British World, 1553–1558,” based on her latest edited book project; took part in a delayed launch for her 2020 monograph, Tudor Empire; and chaired two sessions, a roundtable on the academic job market on both sides of the Atlantic and a plenary featuring an expert in the study of piracy and lead historian behind the recently announced discovery of the Gloucester, which was shipwrecked in 1682 off the coast of Norfolk. 

Assistant Professor of Education Raquel Sáenz Ortiz led a workshop titled “Forum Theatre as a Community Tool in Shaping Liberatory Educators” at the 2022 International Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, held May 26–29 in Chicago.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis participated in “I Belong to You,” a multimedia experience presented by Inversion Ensemble and featuring the world premiere of “Motherland/I Belong to You,” an oratorio blending poetry, comic book illustration, and choral music, on June 25. The autobiographical libretto by critically acclaimed comic book author Greg Pak (The Incredible Hulk, Star Wars) explores the history, culture, and natural wonders of Texas from the perspective of a native Texan during the various stages of his life. The musical adaptation of Pak’s text by Inversion’s three founding members—Inglis, Robbie LaBanca, and Trevor F. Shaw—was sung by Inversion’s flagship choral ensemble and accompanied by guest artists Invoke (string quartet) and Ethan Shaw (steel guitarist). “Motherland/I Belong to You” will also be published as an original comic book by Pak, commissioned by Inversion, with illustrations by renowned artists Ann Smith, Dustinn Craig, Ethan Young, Sean Chen, and Shing Yin Khor. A recording of the performance may be purchased via the Inversion website. 

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Raquel Moreira was interviewed and quoted as an expert source for an Los Angeles Timesprofile featuring Brazilian pop star Anitta, who is set to perform at LA Pride 2022. 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Jeffrey Easton was appointed to the Ladislaus J. Bolchazy Pedagogy Book Award Subcommittee of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Each year the subcommittee selects the recipient of the award, which recognizes a distinguished new book on classroom instruction in classical languages and culture. 

Associate Professor of Business Debika Sihi was featured in a column about the use of virtual reality technology in education on the technology news and information website Lifewire. 

Associate Professor of Business Debika Sihi published an article titled “What Adventure Will You Choose: New or Nostalgic?” in Adweek.

Associate Professor of Art History Allison Miller published the article “Painting Bronze in Early China: Uncovering Polychromy in China’s Classical Sculptural Tradition” in the spring 2022 issue of Archives of Asian Art.

Dean of Enrollment Services Christine Bowman presented on test-optional admission policies with colleagues from Rhodes College, the College of Wooster, and Colleges That Change Lives at the Independent Educational Consultants Association 2022 Spring Conference, held May 16–18 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin published the chapter “All Around the World: Revolutionary Potential in the Age of Authoritarian Revanchism” in Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century: The New Waves of Revolutions, and the Causes and Effects of Disruptive Political Change, edited by Jack A. Goldstone, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev (Springer). Selbin was also an invited participant in a roundtable titled “Ideology and Authoritarian Resilience in the Global South” at the 2022 Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference, held virtually May 30–June 3.

Associate Professor of Theatre and Department Chair Kerry Bechtel designed the costumes for a production of The Sweet Delilah Swim Clubat Unity Theater in Brenham, Texas. Unity Theater is a professional theater located midway between Austin and Houston that brings together professional actors, directors, and designers from both cities. The production runs from June 2–19. 

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala supervised four student projects presented at the Communicating Diversity Student Conference 2022 hosted by Texas A&M University. Congratulations to the following scholars:

• Mary Smith  ’23: “Hegemonic Masculinity and Duke Cannon Supply Co.”
• Preston Willis  ’23: “‘Taylor Swift Doesn’t Write Her Own Music’: Discourse On Women’s Ownership, Androcentrism in the Music Industry, and the Emergence of Swiftian Feminism”
• Katie Love  ’23: “Play it Again: The Story Behind Taylor Swift’s Re-recordings and Professional Heartbreak”
• Jessica Bettis  ’23: “Tragedy at Astroworld: How Unintentional Loss Makes an Impact”

Professor of Education Michael Kamen and Tugce Arda Tuncdemir of Lock Haven University presented a workshop titled “Performance, Play, and Script Writing in College Classes for Preservice Teachers” at the Association for the Study of Play Online Conference.

Southwestern alumna Natalie DeCesare ’19 received the St. Mary’s University School of Law Dean’s Award. The award recognizes students who demonstrate excellence in academics, a commitment to fellow students and the community, and great potential in the professional trajectory.

Director of the A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs has been appointed to represent academic libraries in Texas on the Texas Library Association Conference Planning Committee. This committee creates and prepares professional development opportunities for Texas librarians. Riggs was appointed due to her work researching library roles on campus and leadership development.

Director of the A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center Alexia Riggs has been invited to join the Association of College and Research Libraries College Library Director Mentoring Program Board. In this role, Riggs will serve with national library leaders to prepare new library directors for leadership. This international program provides a year of guidance to new library directors serving at private and public four-year institutions with a full-time enrollment of under 5,000. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper gave a virtual presentation titled “Freedom, Justice, and Jazz: An American Odyssey” for the New Horizons International Music Association. The presentation began with a cursory review of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and proposed that the creative urges that resulted in the musical revolutions of jazz were able to achieve extraordinary prominence not only as an art form, but also as a sonorous expression of the forces that underlay and are embodied in the fifth level (self-actualization) of Maslow’s hierarchy. Using guided questions and assigned listening, the presentation applied this thesis to Langston Hughes’s iconic poem “The Weary Blues” (both in its original 1925 literary guise and in his own televised reading with a jazz ensemble in 1958), the televised performance of Max Roach’s and Abbey Lincoln’s “Triptych” from the Freedom Now Suite, and Bob Kaufman’s poem “Walking Parker Home.” The presentation was adapted from a class assignment in Cooper’s fall 2021 course, Music and Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to #BlackLivesMatter. 

Theatre students Dane Parker ’22, Campbell Duffy ’22, Jaime Hotaling ’23, Harrison Jones ’23, Oskar Brian ’22, Jessica Workman ’22, Ash Zunker ’25, and Lilly Percifield ’22 performed G.H.O.S.T. Unit: The Live Event on February 26 and advanced from the Region 6 Festival (where they received three Meritorious Achievement Awards for Innovative Theatre Practices, Outstanding Ensemble, and Support of New Work) to the national Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Cast and crew received the Innovative Theatrical Experience Special Achievement Award. G.H.O.S.T. Unit: The Live Eventis part of Associate Professor of Theatre Sergio Costola’s 2021–2022 and 2022–2023 faculty-student projects.

Associate Professor of History Jess Hower published Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction, the second book in a two-volume edited collection. The companion to Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation, which was published earlier this spring, the book is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s internationally renowned “Queenship and Power” series and features 10 original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Hower wrote the introduction with her coeditor, Valerie Schutte. The archival research, writing, and (especially) editing processes were supported by a Jones Competitive Course Release Sabbatical across the 2020–2021 academic year. The book may be ordered online.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti gave an invited lecture at Texas Christian University on April 13. Her talk drew from her recently completed book manuscript titled Contemplative Democracy: Embodied Social Change as Ordinary Political Theory, currently under review with Oxford University Press.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper taught a class and delivered a public preconcert lecture at the University of Missouri–Kansas City Conservatory on the occasion of a performance of the Margaret Bonds/Du Bois Credo by the conservatory’s combined choirs (150 voices) and orchestra in the world-renowned Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. Titled “FLEX: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Margaret Bonds and Her Credo,” the class and lecture adduced unpublished correspondence between Bonds and Shirley Graham Du Bois to illustrate how the political economy of classical music and music publishing works to erase, tacitly but potently, the presence of women, Black folk, and their art in musical life and narratives of music’s history. 

Part-time Instructor of Theatre Yesenia Garcia Herrington ’03 was selected to join the second annual tuition-free program “Commercial Theatre Producing 101” sponsored by Theatre Producers of Color, based out of New York City. The competitive 10-week program provides education, training, and mentorship to aspiring BIPOC producers. She also was invited to participate in a “Women in Theatre” panel at Texas State University on April 30.

Allison Hewett ’22, Vy Nguyen ’22, and Associate Professor of Psychology Carin Perilloux presented a poster at the Western Psychological Association 102nd Annual Convention, held April 27–May 1 in Portland, Oregon. This poster, titled “Who Gets the Tingles? Modeling ASMR Predictors,” represents their work during SCOPE 2021.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth presented an invited webinar for the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Special Interest Group on Small Undergraduate German Programs on May 4. The webinar, titled “Pragmatic Program-Building Blocks for Small German Programs,” addressed a national audience and offered examples of the what, why, and how of program building, such as developing a signature “best” (e.g., the German program best at producing Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Award recipients), building connections across disciplines and programs, developing a focus on justice issues, and intensifying outreach strategies.

History major Saúl Zúñiga ’22 presented a poster titled “To Live and Birth On: Mexican Midwives’ Prosperity into Modernity” at the 95th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, held April 21–24 in Saratoga Springs, New York. The poster is the culmination of a faculty-student research project carried out in the summer of 2021 with Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones and a King Creativity Fund award Zúñiga used to further his archival research in Mexico City in the winter of the same year.

Part-time Assistant Professor of Music and concert cellist Hai Zheng Olefsky was invited to give a live music performance and talk as the guest speaker at the May 19 installment of the Full Circle: Speaker Series for Creatives in Georgetown, Texas. She was also interviewed for a feature article in Georgetown View magazine. 

Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarcowas awarded $14,580 from the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservation District for her grant proposal titled “From Transect to Landscape: Investigating the Role of Remote Sensing Tools to Monitor Soil Moisture with Wet Meadow Restoration in the Gunnison Valley.”

Assistant Professor of Biology Jennie DeMarco presented her research titled “Evaluating the Carbon Sequestration Potential and Drought Resilience with Wet Meadow Restoration under a Changing Climate” at the High Altitude Revegetation Committee and Society for Ecological Restoration–Rocky Mountains Chapter 2022 Conference held April 13–14, in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Assistant Professor of Education Raquel Sáenz Ortiz presented a paper titled “Reimagining Spaces of Learning for Youth of Color: A Model of Emancipatory Pedagogy” at the 2022 American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, held April 21–26 in San Diego, California. The paper is a case study of an alternative school in the Northeast that roots itself in culturally sustaining models of teaching.

Associate Professor of History Jethro Hernández Berrones published the chapter “An Undesirable Past: Free Medical Schools and the First Doctors of the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1945” in the book Transforming Medical Education: Historical Case Studies of Teaching, Learning, and Belonging in Medicine, edited by Delia Gavrus and Susan Lamb. The chapter examines the tensions between proprietary medical schools and post-revolutionary governments. It argues that free schools offered a space between popular and state medicine for the training of working-class Mexicans who reached communities with little access to medicine decades before government-sponsored medical schools and public health institutions implemented programs to do so. Sanitation as a cultural policy to modernize the nation led government institutions to treat free schools and their graduates as germs subject to eradication. Although unsuccessful, these institutions aimed to erase the schools’ history and ban their graduates from practice. The chapter demonstrates the central role of popular actors in the regulation of medical training and practice in Mexico after the revolution. 

Associate Professor of History Jessica Hower published Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation, the first book in a two-volume edited collection. The book is part of Palgrave Macmillan’s internationally renowned “Queenship and Power” series and features 12 original, peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Hower wrote the introduction with her coeditor, Valerie Schutte, and also wrote a stand-alone chapter, “‘Horrible and Bloudye’ or ‘Most Serene and Potent’: Mary I and Empire.” The archival research, writing, and (especially) editing processes were supported by a Jones Competitive Course Release Sabbatical across the 2020–2021 academic year. The first volume is available here; volume two should be out later this summer.

Director of the A. Frank Smith Library Center Alexia Riggs was invited to present at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference, held April 25–28 in Fort Worth, Texas. Her first session, “A Roadmap for Your Library’s Future,” discussed institutional knowledge and assessment for long-range strategic planning. Riggs also participated in a panel of key state leaders titled “Lessons Learned: Planning for the Future” that presented information for both public and academic library leaders on preparing for an institutional mission in a post-pandemic world.

Part-time Instructor of Applied Music Adrienne Inglis’s composition “El Mar” (2020) for mixed chorus and piano will enjoy its live premiere performance by the San Francisco State University Chamber Singers on May 6. The piece expresses the angst and tragedy in Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni’s “Frente al Mar.”

Assistant Professor of English Rebecca Evans took part in the symposium The Aesthetics of Infrastructure/The Infrastructure of Aesthetics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which was held April 21–22. An interdisciplinary group of scholars shared their work on infrastructure and the environmental humanities at the event.

Jonathan Smart ’23 presented his work with Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby titled “Quantifying the Printability of Biomaterial Inks” on April 23 at the Heart of Texas Undergraduate Research Conference sponsored by Baylor Undergraduate Research in Science & Technology. 

Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe was recently invited by Academiato conduct a review of an article about St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv, Ukraine: An Appreciation by Myroslava Hartmond (Halushka).

Howe also was invited by the office of Rep. John Carter to be a judge for the Congressional Art Competition on April 27. The winning artwork will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol for one year.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies Jordan Johnson ’11 will receive a stipend to participate in the Bucknell Summer Institute this June.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Rico Self was invited to deliver the prestigious LSU Geaux Rhetoric Speaker Series keynote, which commands a national audience, on March 10. Self followed in the illustrious footsteps of renowned communication studies scholars Ersula Ore, Steven Salaita, and Jo Hsu. His keynote discussed black womanist and feminist rhetoric of the J-Settes, a collegiate women’s dance line.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth presented research from her sabbatical project at the virtual conference of the Association for Intercultural German Studies at the University of Zadar in Croatia, held April 19–22. Her paper titled “Ausgewählte Texte aus Lyrik, Essays, und Romanen von Marica Bodrožić mit Kritischen Perspektiven aus den Umweltgeisteswissenschaften” provided an environmental humanities perspective on the literature of migration to the conference theme of intercultural spaces in the Mediterranean.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura  gave a talk titled “Curious Invariants in Projective Geometry, and Where to Find them in Art and Music” at the Rice University Undergraduate Colloquium in Houston, Texas, on April 5. 

Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar was one of the central people interviewed for The Taking, a feature-length documentary film by Alexandre O. Phillipe about Monument Valley.  The film explores how Monument Valley, located on the border of Arizona and Utah but also within the Navajo Nation, has repeatedly been made into a symbol of the white settler myth of the American West by filmmakers and other media producers while denying Navajo sovereignty and subjectivity. The Taking has appeared at multiple film festivals in the last several months, including the BFI London Film Festival, Fantastic Fest in Austin, and the New Zealand International Film Festival.

​​On April 13, Southwestern University’s Upsilon Alpha Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. (AKA), hosted its AKA Spirit of Giving Virtual Awards Ceremony. The awards were presented to faculty members and a deserving student leader for their commitment to supporting students of color on the Southwestern University campus. The awards are given in honor of the philanthropic deeds of Vice President for University Relations and Strategic Initiatives Paul Secord and his family. This year’s recipients were Eugenia Gabrielle Agobe ’22, psychologist and Assistant Director of the Counseling and Health Center Rachel McNally, Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala, Professor of Spanish and Chair of Latin American and Border Studies Carlos De Oro, Professor of Sociology Reggie Byron, Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore, and Assistant Professor of Sociology Erika Grajeda. For more details, see the event program.

Spanish majors Evelyn Eason ’22 and Danielle Perales ’23 presented papers at the Latin American and Latinx Studies Symposium at Rollins College on April 8. Eason presented “Poesia Indígena y Ecofeminismo en la Obra de Irma Pineda Santiago (Indigenous Poetry and Ecofeminism in the Work of Irma Pineda Santiago).” This presentation is based on her Spanish honor thesis. Perales presented “La Importancia de Conocer: El Humanismo Lúdico en Diarios de Motocicleta(The Power of Knowledge: Ludic Humanism in The Motorcycle Diaries).” Both presentations were delivered in Spanish and stemmed from upper-level courses taught by Associate Professor of Spanish María de los Ángeles Rodriguez Cadena.

Head of Special Collections and Archives Megan Firestone has been accepted into the doctor of education in learning and organizational change program at Baylor University. 

Director of the A. Frank Smith Library Center Alexia Riggs has been named to the TexShare Advisory Board and will serve as the state representative for private academic libraries. This is a high honor for Southwestern University. The TexShare Advisory Board is charged by statute to advise the Texas State Library and Archives Commission on matters relating to the TexShare consortium. In addition to the state librarian of Texas, the advisory board includes representatives from community colleges, private universities, publicly funded academic institutions, medical libraries, public libraries, and the general public.

Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar  traveled to Greenville, South Carolina, to represent Southwestern University at the Southern States Communication Association Annual Convention in April. She presented a paper titled “Jill Biden, Resistance, and Stepmothering: Resilience in the Neoliberal Landscape” and was an invited guest on a panel focused on student accessibility and increasing diversity in online teaching.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Rachel Berger ’23, and Alaina Dixon ’24 presented their faculty-student project “Destructive or Democratic? Perceptions of Civility and Protest Attitudes” at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, held April 7–10 in Chicago. They were joined at the conference by Antonio Esparza ‘22, who presented his research “Climate-Fueled Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Case Study of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand.” Esparza’s work, which he developed under the supervision of Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder, was part of the undergraduate poster session titled “Politics in a Time of Crisis: COVID-19 and Climate Change.”

Professor of Music Lois Ferrari led the Austin Civic Orchestra (ACO) in the fourth concert of its “Reunited” season on April 2. The performance was the 8th Texas Rising Stars concert and featured the three winners of the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music String Concerto Competition as soloists. The program included music by Tchaikovsky, Chausson, and Brahms, along with a performance of the Ukrainian national anthem. Ferrari is currently in her 20th consecutive season with the ACO.

Director of the A. Frank Smith Library Center Alexia Riggs  successfully defended her dissertation, “Collaborative Relationships: Effective Partnerships Between Librarians, Student Affairs, and Faculty,” which was accepted with no revisions needed. Her multisite case study reviewed the collaborative work of librarians at three private institutions in North Carolina through Yamagata-Lynch’s modified activity theory. Riggs will graduate with a doctor of education degree from Texas A&M University–Commerce.  

Demi Tomasides ’22 presented her paper “Othered: The Black and White Portrayal of Neurodiversity in Grey’s Anatomy” at the 2022 Alpha Chi National Convention, held March 24–26 in Austin, Texas. Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala supervised her project.

Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala  recently delivered two guest lectures: “Potty Politics” was delivered to honors undergraduate students at the University of Texas at Austin, and “Feminist Collaboration” was delivered to a feminist organizing graduate seminar at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was guest musicologist for a two-day Florence Price Festival at Bowling Green State University. In addition to meeting with musicology and other music students, Cooper delivered two lectures as part of his visit: “Hear Her Voice: On Knowing Florence Price, Pianist, Today” and “’With Love, Devotion to the Negro Race and Humanity …’: Margaret Bonds and the Social Work of The Montgomery Variations.” Both talks were updated versions of lectures previously given virtually, now incorporating new information and issues raised by archival sources. In addition to aspiring to keep his audiences only minimally vegetative through 45 minutes’ worth of musicological droning, Cooper strove above all in these two talks (which were addressed to audiences comprised primarily of younger individuals beginning careers that may enable them to make the world a better place) to convey a sense of the courage and hope that motivated both Price and Bonds in their work as they challenged an unjust system and used art not as entertainment, but as an agent of social change.

Professor of Sociology Sandi Nenga presented her paper “When Six Feet Feels Like Six Miles: Children’s Images of Their Lives During the Pandemic” at the Southern Sociological Society 85th Annual Meeting, held April 6–9 in Birmingham, Alabama. Hannah Mitchell ’22 also presented her capstone paper “Praise on the Stage and Criticism in Class: Understanding Relationships Between Students and Their Instructors in Competitive Irish Dance Studios.”

Professor of English and Austin Term Chair Eileen Cleere has had an article accepted for publication by Children’s Literature Association Quarterly.The essay, “Going Downtown: ‘Right Reading,’ Mental Hygiene, and the Adolescent Sublimation of Victorian Sensation,” was first presented as a Paideia Connections Lecture in 2015.

At the 2022 Experimental Biology conference, held April 1–5 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Assistant Professor of Kinesiology Jennifer Stokes presented two research abstracts at the poster sessions hosted by the American Physiological Society (APS). The first project abstract, titled “Daily E-cigarette Vapor Exposure Does Not Modify Response to 10% Normobaric Hypoxia in Long-Evans Rats,” presented data from the StokesLab summer 2021 faculty-student project conducted by kinesiology student Alicia Peters ’23. The second abstract presented additional data from an ongoing pedagogical project titled “Using Google Tools to Increase Student Learning, Engagement, and Collaboration in Remote, Hybrid, and In-person Courses.” Stokes was also awarded the 2022 Early Career Award in Education Research at the APS Teaching Section Banquet.

Southwestern University was well represented at the American Chemical Society Spring 2022 meeting in San Diego, California. Eight students presented a total of six posters at the meeting: Yusuf Buhari ’23, Sean Calvert ’22, Gabrielle Cano ’22, Natalie Gierat ’22, Rhoda Hijazi ’22, Jared McCormack ’22, Neha Momin ’22, and Ethan Shilgalis ’22. This work was done collaboratively with Associate Professor of Chemistry Mike Gesinski, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Sara Massey, and Professor of Chemistry Emily Niemeyer.

Members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science attended the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America (Texas MAA), held March 31–April 2 at the University of North Texas, the first in-person Texas MAA meeting since 2019. 

• Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “An n-bubble Result on a Dense Number Line.” Ross also participated in the professional development program of the Texas New Experiences in Teaching (NExT), held in conjunction with the Texas MAA meeting. 
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “From Cars to Competition to Cholera: Math Models in Differential Equations.” As section representative to the national governing body, the MAA Congress, Shelton also led events at the executive committee meeting, the business meeting, and more.
• Emily Thompson  ’22 presented “Using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) to Create Models of Complex Curves,” which was the result of her mathematics capstone from fall 2022, supervised by Shelton. 
• Mel Richey ’23 and Kevan Kennedy ’24 attended the conference. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper  gave a presentation titled “The Prophecies Fulfilled: Margaret Bonds and the Sacred Social Work of The Montgomery Variations and the Du Bois Credo ” at Georgetown University. The presentation explored how Margaret Bonds’s work in celebrating Black vernacular music in genres traditionally reserved for Euro-American classical repertoires was a 20th-century enactment of ideas first proposed in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Frederick Douglass, James Monroe Trotter, Frédéric Louis Ritter, Antonin Dvořák, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The presentation was followed the next day by a preconcert lecture (also at Georgetown University) for the first performance since 1973 of the orchestral version of the Bonds/Du Bois Credo and Bonds’s orchestral magnum opus, The Montgomery Variations (both recently discovered and published by Cooper), along with excerpts from her recently published cantata Simon Bore the Cross. 

Professor of Psychology Traci Giuliano’s article “High Impact: Examining Predictors of Faculty-Undergraduate Coauthored Publication and Presentation in Psychology” was published in the journal PLOS ONE. All three coauthors, Isham Kimbell ’21, Emily Olsen ’20, and Jennifer Howell ’09, were current or former undergraduates at the time the research was conducted.

Professor of English and Austin Term Chair Eileen Cleere presented a paper at the 2022 Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS) Annual Conference, held March 24–27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her paper, “The Stratified Family Story: Dinah Mulock Craik’s The Head of the Family (1852) and the Problem of Pedophilia,” is part of a larger project about the discourses of rape, grooming, and sexual assault within the genre of fiction known as the Victorian family story. Cleere also chaired a panel titled “Queer Studies, Performance, and Desire.”

Professor of English and Austin Term Chair Eileen Cleere has been promoted to first vice president of Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS), an international group of scholars dedicated to interdisciplinary discussion and research.

Assistant Professor of Biology Kim McArthur gave an invited virtual presentation on equity in grading to the Union College (Schenectady, New York) faculty on March 22. The presentation, titled “Rethinking Traditional Grading, Working Towards Equity,” provided a framework for considering the impact of traditional grading practices on student equity, with suggestions for reconsidering and fully aligning assessment practices with course learning objectives.

Lurlyn and Durwood Fleming Professor of Philosophy Phil Hopkins has completed a second 10-month contract with the Austin Police Department (APD), this time to develop guidelines and formal procedures for selecting and reviewing video training material for the Cadet Academy that focus on recognizing and addressing the ways video material can have unintended consequences and harms and may reinforce rather than disrupt larger cultural narratives and stereotypes. Hopkins has written and submitted a final report to APD and the Austin City Council. He remains under contract for the remainder of this year on the larger curriculum review committee whose task is to review and develop improved training curricula and content across the several training regimes for APD. This work was recently featured in a 60 Minutesepisode that noted its innovative (and largely unprecedented) approach but not the many and various difficulties it faces among entrenched institutional histories and competing political agendas. 

Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics Jeffrey Easton presented a paper in a panel on the permutations of Roman political power at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, held March 23–26 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His paper reexamined the use of the office of dictator in the early centuries of the Roman Republic. Easton also presided over a panel at the conference that dealt with Roman law and politics.

Professor of Music Michael Cooper was interviewed on historian Pamela Toler’s blog, “History in the Margins,” about his work in excavating and bringing back into public life the music of Florence B. Price and Margaret Bonds, including his motives, hopes, and trepidations. As is customary on the blog, Cooper asked a question of Toler after answering her questions to him. Read the complete interview. 

Professor of Music Michael Cooper helped organize the world premiere of Florence B. Price’s choral/orchestral work “Song of Hope” (1930) at Ithaca College and participated in a pre-concert panel discussion on the piece and its significance. Learn more about the event and the work on the Ithaca College website.