Achievements from Faculty in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
View our latest newsletter and read more about Faculty, Student, and Alumni Achievements from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archaeology
Jennie Bradbury gave the talk “The Kubba Coastal Survey, Lebanon: Archaeology, Heritage and Landscapes of Transformation,” at the 2020 joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies. Professor Emeritus James Wright was also in attendance at AIA/SCS as the discussant for the panel "Between the Mountains and the Sea: Exploring Sissi on Crete."
Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway celebrated her 90th birthday on November 14, 2019. Her birthday was marked with an outpouring of well wishes and recollections from former students, colleagues, and friends.
Classics
Annette Baertschi published the article "Cicero, Lucan, and Rhetorical Role-Play in Bellum Civile 7," in Lucan's Imperial World: The Bellum Civile in Its Contemporary Contexts, edited by Laura Zientek and Mark Thorne, London (Bloomsbury). Professor Baertschi organized and co-chaired (together with Meredith E. Safran, Trinity College) a panel entitled Family Matters: Familial Structures and Relationships in the Ancient World and in Modern Media at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) in Silver Spring, MD on October 11, 2019. The panel was sponsored by "Antiquity in Media Studies" (AIMS), a new professional organization consisting of researchers and teachers interested in promoting and supporting scholarship on the various uses of the ancient world in modern media. Professor Baertschi presented a paper at the panel mentioned above entitled "The Family under the Looking Glass: Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth (2009)."
In addition, Professor Baertschi organized and moderated a special colloquium in honor of Lily Ross Taylor on November 22, 2019 at Bryn Mawr. The event featured four distinguished guest speakers: T. Corey Brennan (Rutgers), Judy P. Hallett (Maryland), Celia E. Schultz (Michigan), and Jane E. Cody (USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences). Professor Baertschi was also director of the 12th Biennial Graduate Group Symposium Irresistible Night, Ageless Dark in November. Professor Baertschi also presented the paper "Exemplarity in Petrarch's Africa," at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) on January 4, 2020.
Catherine Conybeare received an NEH Grant for a conference and the preparation of an edited volume of essays on the influential Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity by philosopher Charles Taylor. Professor Conybeare presented “Sunt Mihi Multae Curae: Self-Writing and the Emotional Reader” in the panel " Readers and Reading: Current Debates" at the 2020 joint annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society for Classical Studies.
Radcliffe Edmonds discussed the myths at the heart of Tony-award winning 'Hadestown'. This past Fall he published the book Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greek and Roman World with Princeton University Press. In November he gave the talk “Magic and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance: Defining Magic in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” at the Society for Biblical Literature/American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, San Diego, California. Also in November Professor Edmonds delivered the keynote address titled “First-Born of Night or Oozing from the Slime? Deviant Origins in Orphic Cosmogonies” for the Bryn Mawr Graduate Group Symposium Irresistible Night, Ageless Dark.
History of Art
David Cast reviewed The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art by Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017) for Renaissance Quarterly 72 (2):613-614.
Christiane Hertel published her book Siting China in Germany: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie and Its Modern Legacy, with Penn State University Press in 2019.
Homay King published the catalogue essay in conjunction with the public art exhibition in the City of Philadelphia, entitled “Statues Also Live: Tania Bruguera’s Monument to New Immigrants,” in Monument Lab, edited by Paul Farber and Kenneth Lum (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019). Professor King reviewed “Jonathan Flatley’s Like Andy Warhol,” for Social Text Online (February 2019). In March, Professor King delivered the keynote address for the virtual conference Virtual Varga: Agnès Varda's Sustaining Legacy.
Jie Shi published his book Modeling Peace: Royal Tombs and Political Ideology in Early China in March with Columbia University Press. Professor Shi reviewed Material Culture, Power, and Identity in Ancient China, By Xiaolong Wu. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) for the Journal of Chinese History (November 2019): 1–3.
Alicia Walker was special guest writer for the blog The Material Collective with the article “Bootstrapping the Soft History of Female Subjecthood in the Middle Ages.”
Chemistry
Sharon Burgmayer presented the talk “Roles for Pterin in Moco” at the Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes Conference XI held in Potsdam, Germany, in July. Professor Burgmayer was joined by Cassandra Gates, M.A.' 19, who gave an invited talk and Haley Varnam, A.B./M.A. '19, who presented a research poster.
Michelle Francl explained to The Washington Post how a can of dry shampoo blasted a hole in the roof of a Missouri woman's car. Professor Francl also commented in the Post’s article on the role of vitamin E acetate in vaping-related illnesses. Her article “Double Vision,” was published in Nature Chemistry in July.
Bill Malachowski was co-author on the article “Palladium-catalyzed mono-γ-arylation of 7-methoxy-4-methylcoumarin,” in Tetrahedron Letters, 60 (38).
Math
John Bergdall published the article “Upper bounds for constant slope p-adic families of modular forms,” in Selecta Mathematica - New Series, 25 (4). Professor Bergdall was co-author of the article “Slopes of Modular Forms and the Ghost Conjecture, II," in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 372 (1): 357-388.
Leslie Cheng was co-author of the article “Oscillatory Singular Integral Operators with Hölder- Class Kernels,” in Journal of Fourier Analysis and Applications, 25 (4): 2141-2149.
Bill Dunham received the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) for his article "The Early (and Peculiar) History of the Möbius Function." Dr. Dunham credited Collier Library as the source of inspiration for the article in his response to the MAA.
Physics
Peter Beckmann published the article “Concomitant Polymorphism in an Organic Solid: Molecular and Crystal Structure and Intra- and Intermolecular Potential Contributions to tert-Butyl and Methyl Group Rotation,” in CHEMPHYSCHEM, Volume 20, Issue 21, November 5, 2019, Pages 2887-2894.;
Xuemei Cheng published the article “Sono-Assisted Surface Energy Driven Assembly of 2D Materials on Flexible Polymer Substrates: A Green Assembly Method Using Water,” in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 11 (36):33458-33464. Professor Cheng was co-author on the article “Tunable and Reversible Substrate Stiffness Reveals a Dynamic Mechanosensitivity of Cardiomyocytes,” in ACS Applied Materiels & Interfaces, 11 (23):20603-20614; and “Tunable spin-state bistability in a spin crossover molecular complex,”in Journal of Physics-Condensed Matter, 31 (31).
Kate Daniel and David Schaffner published the article “When Cold Radial Migration is Hot: Constraints from Resonant Overlap,” in Astrophysical Journal, 882 (2).
David Schaffner received a grant from the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation program to develop a software infrastructure called PlasmaPy that aims to streamline and standardize analysis and modeling programming for the plasma physics community over the next five years. Professor Schaffner also attended the Minority Serving Institution Faculty Workshop in Plasma Physics at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory last summer. Professor Schaffner led Summer Science program students on a tour of the Princeton lab in early August.