Smith Library Center
First Thursday
First Thursday gatherings recognize & celebrate the scholarly achievements of Southwestern faculty and staff.
The First Thursday reception for April 2023 will be April 6th At the Howry Center, 4:00-5:00 PM
Thursday, April, 2023
Lamiyah Bahrainwala, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Bahrainwala, L. (2020). Shithole Rhetorics. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication DOI: 10.1080/17513057.2020.1795224.
Bahrainwala, L. (2019) Blind Submission. Communication, Culture and Critique, DOI:10.1093/ccc/tcz027.
Bahrainwala, L. & O’Connor, E (2019) “Nike Unveils Muslim Women Athletes.” FeministMedia Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2019.1620822.
Erika Berroth, Associate Professor of German
Berroth, Erika, Federica LaMana, Waltraud Maierhofer, Co-Editors.: “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.
Berroth, Erika. “Repräsentationen von Gehörlosigkeit im Film – Jenseits der Stille im Kontext der ‘Deaf Futures.’” “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. 489-506.
Katy Ross, Professor of Spanish
Ross, Catherine B. and Bailey Barlow. “Questioning Motherhood: The Commercialization and Medicalization of Infertility in Quién quiere ser madre (2017) by Silvia Nanclares” in Beyond Biology: Rhetorics of Motherhood in the 21st Century, edited by Valerie Renegar and Kirsti Cole. Routledge, 2023.
Katy Ross, Professor of Spanish and Katie Aha, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
“Populism and Surrogacy in Spain.” Women’s Studies (December 2022): 1-21. Co-written with Dr. Katie Aha and Catherine Hiebel, SU graduate 2022. DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2022.2147178.
Therese Shelton, Associate Professor of Mathematics
Shelton, T., Henderson, B., Gebhardt, M. (2022). Acrobatics in a Parametric Arena. In: Goldwyn, E.E., Ganzell, S., Wootton, A. (eds) Mathematics Research for the Beginning Student, Volume 1. Foundations for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08560-4_5 Pages 113-136.
March 2023
Celebration of Books:
Sergio Costola, Associate Professor of Theatre and Michael Saenger, Professor of English
Shakespeare in Succession: Translation and Time, edited by Michael Saenger and Sergio Costola (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023)
Alisa Gaunder, Professor of Political Science
Gaunder, Alisa. Japanese Politics and Government, 2 nd Edition. London: Routledge, 2023
Jessica Hower, Associate Professor of History
Jessica S. Hower and Valerie Schutte, eds., Mary I in Writing: Letters, Literature, and Representation (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Jessica S. Hower and Valerie Schutte, eds., Writing Mary I: History, Historiography, and Fiction (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Aaron Prevots, Professor of French
Esther Tellermann: Enigma, Prayer, Identity. Brill, 2022.
Thursday, November 3, 2022
Bob Bednar, Professor of Communication Studies
Bednar, Robert Matej, “Trauma Remains: The Material Afterlives of the 1989 Alton School Bus Crash,” Journal of Material Culture, vol. 27, no. 4 (October 2022). doi.org/10.1177/13591835221132200
Ron Geibel, Assistant Professor of Art
Discussing the installation “Untitled (call logs),” currently on view at Southwestern in the exhibition “Continuance: Faculty Art Exhibition” in the Sarofim Fine Arts Gallery.
Raji Kunapuli, Assistant Professor of Business
Westphal, J., Zhu, D., & Kunapuli, R. (2021). Seeking Input when the Train has Left the Station: The Decoupling of Participative Strategic Decision-Making Processes and the Role of New Technology in Symbolic Management. Strategic Organization.
Star Varner, Professor of Art
Cabinet Oak Project, Curated by Katie Robinson Edwards—Director and Curator at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden, Austin, Texas.
Tuesday, October 4, 2022
Melissa Byrnes, Associate Professor of History
“Anti-Salazarism and Transnational Solidarity: Franco-Portuguese Student Activism in the 1960s,” French History and Civilization, Vol. 10 (August 2021), pp. 4-18.
Eileen Cleere, Professor of English
Rape in Public: Overlooking Child Sexual Assault in Charlotte Mary Yonge’s 1856 The Daisy Chain. Victorian Literature and Culture, Volume 50, Issue 1, Spring 2022, pp. 61 - 86.
Ed Merritt, Associate Professor of Kinesiology
Dr. 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.
Allison Miller, Associate Professor of Art History
“Painting Bronze in Early China Uncovering Polychromy in China’s Classical Sculptural Tradition,” Archives of Asian Art 72.1 (April 2022).
Emily Sydnor, Associate Professor of Political Science
Sydnor, Emily, Emily Tesmer and Breely Peterson. (2022). “Confronting Politics: The Role of Conflict Orientation in Shaping Political Debate” Journal of Deliberative Democracy.
Thursday, September 1, 2022
Fay Guarraci, Professor of Psychology
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.
Jacob Schrum, Associate Professor of Computer Science
J. Schrum, B. Capps, K. Steckel, V. Volz and S. Risi, “Hybrid Encoding For Generating Large Scale Game Level Patterns With Local Variations,” in IEEE Transactions on Games, doi: 10.1109/TG.2022.3170730.
Eric Selbin, Professor of Political Science
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).
Thursday, April 7, 2022 - Celebrating Books
Sergio Costola, Associate Professor of Theatre
Commedia dell’Arte Scenarios, edited by Sergio Costola in collaboration with Olly Crick (London-New York: Routledge, 2022)
The Dramaturgy of Commedia dell’Arte, Olly Crick with Sergio Costola (London-New York: Routledge, 2022)
Raquel Moreira, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Moreira, R. (2021). Bitches Unleashed: Performance and Embodied Politics in Favela Funk. Peter Lang, 2021.
Helene Meyers, Professor of English
Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition (Fall 2021) https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/movie-made-jews/9781978821880
John Ross, Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Kendall Richards, Professor of Mathematics
Ross, J. D., & Richards, K. C. (2020). Introductory analysis: An inquiry approach. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Thursday, April 1, 2021
First Thursday Virtual Reception Celebrating Faculty who Published Books in 2020
Bednar, Bob, Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Title: Road Scars: Place, Automobility, and Road Trauma
Author: Robert Matej Bednar
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020
Brief Description: Road Scars is a highly visual monograph that demonstrates how roadside car crash shrines give embodied form to a dispersed and unresolved cultural trauma embedded within American car culture. It is based on nearly two decades of mobile fieldwork in the American Southwest and features 172 original color photographs.
Cooper, Michael, Professor of Music
Between January and December 2020, I published forty-four (44) world-premiere source-critical editions of works by African American composer Florence B. Price (1887-1953) with G. Schirmer (New York), for a total of fifty-eight Price editions since September 2019. I also published new source-critical editions of the orchestral and piano-vocal versions of Felix Mendelssohn’s symphony-cantata Hymn of Praise (Kassel: Bärenreiter), as well as three major masterpieces by African American composer Margaret A. Bonds (1913-72): her Montgomery Variations (1964); her setting of the W.E.B. Du Bois civil-rights manifesto Credo (1966-67); and her Six Songs on Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay (all Bryn Mawr: Hildegard Publishing). All totaled, that makes forty-nine editions published between January and December.
Hower, Jessica, Associate Professor of History
Title: Tudor Empire: The Making of Britain and the British Atlantic World, 1485-1603
Author: Jessica S. Hower
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Brief Description: The book recasts one of the most well-studied and popularly-beloved eras in history—the tumultuous span from the accession of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I—by focusing on another, equally provocative facet of the British past—imperialism. It argues that expansion abroad and national consolidation and identity formation at home were concurrent, intertwined, and mutually-reinforcing.
Miller, Allison, Associate Professor of Art History
Title: Kingly Splendor: Court Art and Materiality in Han China
Author: Allison R. Miller
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Brief Description: The Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE) was a foundational period for the artistic culture of ancient China, a fact particularly visible in the era’s funerary art. Iconic forms of Chinese art such as dazzling suits of jade; cavernous, rock-cut mountain tombs; fancifully ornate wall paintings; and armies of miniature terracotta warriors were prepared for the tombs of the elite during this period. Many of the finest objects of the Western Han have been excavated from the tombs of kings, who administered local provinces on behalf of the emperors.