Creative Work: Our summer 2024 issue features new stories by Tom Williams, Hannah Lee Thorpe, Genevieve Abravanel, Ann Aspell, Noor Imaan, Justin Chandler, Lawrence Coates, Laura Leigh Morris, and Greg Schutz.

Abravanel, Genevieve. (2024) “The Apology.” Story Issue 19, Summer: 113-121. https://www.storymagazine.org/the-apology/

Creative Work: Ecotone’s mission is to publish and promote the best place-based work being written today. Founded in 2005 at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, on the traditional and ancestral territory of the Waccamaw, Catawba, and Cape Fear People, the award-winning magazine features writing and art that reimagine place. Our authors interpret this charge expansively. An ecotone is a transition zone between two adjacent ecological communities, containing the characteristic species of each. It is therefore a place of danger or opportunity, a testing ground. The magazine explores the ecotones between landscapes, literary genres, scientific and artistic disciplines, identities, and modes of thought. 

Abravanel, Genevieve. (2024) “Bananas, Sweetheart.” Ecotone Magazine, no. 36, Spring/Summer: 87-95. https://ecotonemagazine.org/fiction/bananas-sweetheart/

Creative Work: LIFE WASTE: A Biogas Musical is a new performative work created by Valley Traction. It is a story about organic farmers, alternative energy, circular systems and the challenges and triumphs of sustainability, all told through the format of punk-folk-rock original songs. 

This experimental production taps the talents of local musicians, farmers, artists and carpenters; solar cells and biogas bladders; and a whole lot of recycling...staged with 100% solar power.  

Site specific: designed to be performed in (outdoor) farmland. 

Anderson-Rabern, Rachel (2024) LIFE WASTE: A Biogas Musical. Director, Valley Traction. Site Specific: Dickinson Farm, Carlisle PA, October 4-5. 

Book: This book is a plea for the centrality of the humanities as a vehicle of knowledge about ourselves and about the reality around us.  It illustrates the interpretative arts through the author's close reading of Charles Péguy, Don DeLillo, Bernard d'Espagnat, Wysława Szymborska and Marilynne Robinson. Each of these writers exhibits a complex relationship to the narratives emanating from the sciences--wonder, terror, appreciation, resistance.  All, in different ways, point to a dimension of the human that cannot be captured through scientific method.  In examining the narratives around the sciences, and also the efforts to explore a space that eludes them, The Thought at the Back of the Mind also finds its way into the religious sensibility of our times.

Aronowicz, Annette. The Thought at the Back of the Mind: Five Explorations of the Human in the Age of the Natural Sciences. Pickwick Publications, Wipf & Stock, 2024. 

Book Review: In Yiddish Paris, Nick Underwood insists that something quite unusual happened in France in the 1920s and 1930s, the creation of “a new Jewish cultural diaspora nation” (p. 137). By this, he means that a large group of eastern European immigrant Jews not only advocated for but also instantiated, if only briefly, a separate secular nationhood. The surprising element is that this diaspora nation took root not in eastern Europe where the idea of a secular Jewish nation was born but in France, the first country to grant Jews civil rights, on the condition, however, that the notion of a separate peoplehood disappear. This vision of citizenship required assimilation to French culture. Underwood argues that, in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, the proliferation of Jewish immigrant Yiddish cultural institutions, whose necessary condition was the sheer size of the community—about 150,000 by the mid-1930s—still required as a sufficient condition the support of French leftist institutions (p. 27). The book reveals that the French republican ideal was (and is) malleable enough to accept multicultural forms of French identity. Underwood also maintains that the eastern European immigrants themselves, not only in creating these institutions but also in opening themselves up to French civil and cultural life, were a vanguard of the multicultural republican model, pushing French politics in the multicultural direction.

Aronowicz, Annette. (2024) Review of Yiddish Paris: Staging Nation and Community in Interwar France by Nick Underwood. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews, December. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61460   

Article: Amid debates about various aspects of peer review, one important question has been largely overlooked: Are there patterns in the type of peer review used by scholarly journals across broad disciplinary categories and even specific subjects or disciplines? My study of more than 4,500 journals—which focused specifically on the use of single-blind and double-blind peer review—found that patterned variations clearly exist.

Auster, Carol J. (2024). “Understanding disciplinary differences in peer review.” Academe Winter 2024. https://www.aaup.org/article/understanding-disciplinary-differences-peer-review 

Presentation:

Blackburn, A., Bashaw, M.J., Faith, N.S., Barnhart, T., Leith, H.D., Nursement, C., Ortega, V. Beem, E., Bailey, A., Barnes, J., & Sandhaus, E.A. (2024). “Nutritional supplements ‘biscuits’ increase regurgitation and reingestion behavior in captive gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla).” Presented at the 93rd National conference of the American Association for Biological Anthropology, Los Angeles, CA. https://bioanth.org/93rd-annual-meeting-los-angeles-california-2024/ 

Article: Given the ubiquitous nature of love, numerous theories have been proposed to explain its existence. One such theory refers to love as a commitment device, suggesting that romantic love evolved to foster commitment between partners and enhance their reproductive success. In the present study, we investigated this hypothesis using a large-scale sample of 86,310 individual responses collected across 90 countries. If romantic love is universally perceived as a force that fosters commitment between long-term partners, we expected that individuals likely to suffer greater losses from the termination of their relationships—including people of lower socioeconomic status, those with many children, and women—would place a higher value on romantic love compared to people with higher status, those with fewer children, and men. These predictions were supported. Additionally, we observed that individuals from countries with a higher (vs. lower) Human Development Index placed a greater level of importance on romantic love, suggesting that modernization might influence how romantic love is evaluated. On average, participants worldwide were unwilling to commit to a long-term romantic relationship without love, highlighting romantic love’s universal importance.

Marta Kowal, Adam Bode, Karolina Koszałkowska, S. Craig Roberts, Biljana Gjoneska, David Frederick, Anna Studzinska, Dmitrii Dubrov, Dmitry Grigoryev, Toivo Aavik, Pavol Prokop, Caterina Grano, Hakan Çetinkaya, Derya Atamtürk Duyar, Roberto Baiocco, Carlota Batres, Yakhlef Belkacem, Merve Boğa, Nana Burduli, Ali R. Can, Razieh Chegeni, William J. Chopik, Yahya Don, Seda Dural, Izzet Duyar, Edgardo Etchezahar, Feten Fekih-Romdhane, Tomasz Frackowiak, Felipe E. García, Talia Gomez Yepes, Farida Guemaz, Brahim B. Hamdaoui, Mehmet Koyuncu, Miguel Landa-Blanco, Samuel Lins, Tiago Marot, Marlon Mayorga-Lascano, Moises Mebarak, Mara Morelli, Izuchukwu L. G. Ndukaihe, Mohd Sofian Omar Fauzee, Ma. Criselda Tengco Pacquing, Miriam Parise, Farid Pazhoohi, Ekaterine Pirtskhalava, Koen Ponnet, Ulf-Dietrich Reips, Marc Eric Santos Reyes, Ayşegül Şahin, Fatima Zahra Sahli, Oksana Senyk, Ognen Spasovski, Singha Tulyakul, Joaquín Ungaretti, Mona Vintila, Tatiana Volkodav, Anna Wlodarczyk, Gyesook Yoo, Benjamin Gelbart & Piotr Sorokowski. (2024) “Love as a Commitment Device Evidence from a Cross-Cultural Study across 90 Countries.” Human Nature 35:430–450. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-024-09482-6 🔓

Article: Research has shown that a preference for sweet foods is associated with agreeableness. This association may be due to conceptual metaphors (a “sweetie”) that link sweet taste experiences to niceness. We examined the replicability and cross-cultural consistency of this effect in four samples from different countries (China, Germany, Mexico, & the U.S.). Participants (N = 1,629) completed a measure of agreeableness and two measures of sweet taste preferences. We found that agreeableness was significantly and positively correlated with two different measures of sweet taste preferences in all four samples with small effect sizes (rs = 0.10 to 18). The association between agreeableness and a sweet taste preference appears replicable and occurring across cultures at least in the samples studied.

Meier, Brian P., Michael Schaefer, Li-Jun Ji, Carlota Batres. (2024) “Cross-cultural evidence for an association between agreeableness and sweet taste preferences.” Journal of Research in Personality 113, December: 104547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2024.104547

Article: Ideal partner preferences (i.e., ratings of the desirability of attributes like attractiveness or intelligence) are the source of numerous foundational findings in the interdisciplinary literature on human mating. Recently, research on the predictive validity of ideal partner preference matching (i.e., Do people positively evaluate partners who match vs. mismatch their ideals?) has become mired in several problems. First, articles exhibit discrepant analytic and reporting practices. Second, different findings emerge across laboratories worldwide, perhaps because they sample different relationship contexts and/or populations. This registered report—partnered with the Psychological Science Accelerator—uses a highly powered design (N = 10,358) across 43 countries and 22 languages to estimate preference-matching effect sizes. The most rigorous tests revealed significant preference-matching effects in the whole sample and for partnered and single participants separately. The “corrected pattern metric” that collapses across 35 traits revealed a zero-order effect of β = .19 and an effect of β = .11 when included alongside a normative preference-matching metric. Specific traits in the “level metric” (interaction) tests revealed very small (average β = .04) effects. Effect sizes were similar for partnered participants who reported ideals before entering a relationship, and there was no consistent evidence that individual differences moderated any effects. Comparisons between stated and revealed preferences shed light on gender differences and similarities: For attractiveness, men’s and (especially) women’s stated preferences underestimated revealed preferences (i.e., they thought attractiveness was less important than it actually was). For earning potential, men’s stated preferences underestimated—and women’s stated preferences overestimated—revealed preferences. Implications for the literature on human mating are discussed.

Eastwick, Paul W., Sparks, Jehan, Finkel, Eli J., Meza, Eva M., Adamkovič, Matúš, Adu, Peter, Ai, Ting, Akintola, Aderonke A., Al-Shawaf, Laith, Apriliawati, Denisa, Arriaga, Patrícia, Aubert-Teillaud, Benjamin, Baník, Gabriel, Barzykowski, Krystian, Batres, Carlota, Baucom, Katherine J., Beaulieu, Elizabeth Z., Behnke, Maciej, Butcher, Natalie, Charles, Deborah Y., Chen, Jane Minyan, Cheon, Jeong Eun, Chittham, Phakkanun, Chwiłkowska, Patrycja, Cong, Chin Wen, Copping, Lee T.,Corral-Frias, Nadia S., Ćubela Adorić, Vera, Dizon, Mikaela, Du, Hongfei, Ehinmowo, Michael I., Escribano, Daniela A., Espinosa, Natalia M., Expósito, Francisca, Feldman, Gilad, Freitag, Raquel, Frias Armenta, Martha, Gallyamova, Albina, Gillath, Omri, Gjoneska, Biljana, Gkinopoulos, Theofilos, Grafe, Franca, Grigoryev, Dmitry, Groyecka-Bernard, Agata, Gunaydin, Gul, Ilustrisimo, Ruby, Impett, Emily, Kačmár, Pavol, Kim, Young-Hoon, Kocur, Mirosław, Kowal, Marta, Krishna, Maatangi, Labor, Paul Danielle, Lu, Jackson G., Lucas, Marc Y., Małecki, Wojciech P. ,Malinakova, Klara, Meißner, Sofia, Meier, Zdeněk, Misiak, Michal, Muise, Amy, Novak, Lukas,O, Jiaqing, Özdoğru, Asil A., Park, Haeyoung Gideon, Paruzel, Mariola, Pavlović, Zoran, Püski, Marcell, Ribeiro, Gianni, Roberts, S. Craig, Röer, Jan P., Ropovik, Ivan, Ross, Robert M., Sakman, Ezgi, Salvador, Cristina E., Selcuk, Emre, Skakoon-Sparling, Shayna, Sorokowska, Agnieszka, Sorokowski, Piotr, Spasovski, Ognen, Stanton, Sarah C. E., Stewart, Suzanne L. K., Swami, Viren, Szaszi, Barnabas,Takashima, Kaito,Tavel, Peter,Tejada, Julian,Tu, Eric,Tuominen, Jarno,Vaidis, David, Vally, Zahir, Vaughn, Leigh Ann, Villanueva-Moya, Laura,Wisnuwardhani, Dian,Yamada, Yuki,Yonemitsu, Fumiya,Žídková, Radka, Živná, Kristýna, Coles, Nicholas A. (Epub 2024) “A worldwide test of the predictive validity of ideal partner preference matching.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 128(1), Jan 2025, 123-146. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fe56h

Article: According to the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge, people can truly know something only if they have a belief that is both justified and true (i.e., knowledge is JTB). This account was challenged by Gettier, who argued that JTB does not explain knowledge attributions in certain situations, later called “Gettier-type cases,” wherein protagonists are justified in believing something to be true, but their belief was correct only because of luck. Laypeople may not attribute knowledge to protagonists with justified but only luckily true beliefs. Although some research has found evidence for these so-called Gettier intuitions, Turri et al. found no evidence that participants attributed knowledge in a counterfeit-object Gettier-type case differently than in a matched case of JTB. In a large-scale, cross-cultural conceptual replication of Turri and colleagues’ Experiment 1 (N = 4,724) using a within-participants design and three vignettes across 19 geopolitical regions, we did find evidence for Gettier intuitions; participants were 1.86 times more likely to attribute knowledge to protagonists in standard cases of JTB than to protagonists in Gettier-type cases. These results suggest that Gettier intuitions may be detectable across different scenarios and cultural contexts. However, the size of the Gettier intuition effect did vary by vignette, and the Turri et al. vignette produced the smallest effect, which was similar in size to that observed in the original study. Differences across vignettes suggest that epistemic intuitions may also depend on contextual factors unrelated to the criteria of knowledge, such as the characteristics of the protagonist being evaluated.

Braeden Hall, Kathleen Schmidt, Jordan Wagge, Savannah C. Lewis, Sophia C. Weissgerber, Felix Kiunke, Gerit Pfuhl, Stefan Stieger, Ulrich S. Tran, Krystian Barzykowski, Natalia Bogatyreva, Marta Kowal, Karl IJn Massar, Felizitas Pernerstofer, Piotr Sorokowski, Martin Voracek, Christopher R. Chartier, Mark J. Brandt, Jon E. Grahe, Asil A. ÖzdoğruMichael R. Andreychik, Sau Chin Chen, Thomas R. Evans, Caro Hautekiet, Hans IJzerman, Pavol Kačmár, Anthony J. Krafnick, Erica D. Musser, Evie Vergauwe, Kaitlyn M. Werner, Balazs Aczel, Patrícia Arriaga, Carlota Batres, Jennifer L. Beaudry, Florian Cova, Simona Ďurbisová, Leslie D. Cramblet Alvarez, Gilad Feldman, Hendrik Godbersen, Jaroslav Gottfried, Gerald J. Haeffel, Andree Hartanto, Chris Isloi, Joseph P. McFall, Marina Milyavskaya, David Moreau, Ester Nosáľová, Kostas Papaioannou, Susana Ruiz-Fernandez, Jana Schrötter, Daniel Storage, Kevin Vezirian, Leonhard Volz, Yanna J. Weisberg, Qinyu Xiao, Dana Awlia, Hannah W. Branit, Megan R. Dunn, Agata Groyecka-Bernard, Ricky Haneda, Julita Kielinska, Caroline Kolle, Paweł Lubomski, Alexys M. Miller, Martin J. Mækelæ, Mytro Pantazi, Rafael R. Ribeiro, Robert M. Ross, Agnieszka Sorokowska, Christopher L. Aberson, Xanthippi Alexi Vassiliou, Bradley J. Baker, Miklos Bognar, Chin Wen Cong, Alex F. Danvers, William E. Davis, Vilius Dranseika, Andrei Dumbravă, Harry Farmer, Andy P. Field, Patrick S. Forscher, Aurélien Graton, Nandor Hajdu, Peter A. Howlett, Radosław Kabut, Emmett M. Larsen, Sean T.H. Lee, Nicole Legate, Carmel A. Levitan, Neil Levy, Jackson G. Lu, Michał Misiak, Roxana E. Morariu, Jennifer Novak, Ekaterina Pronizius, Irina Prusova, Athulya S. Rathnayake, Marina O. Romanova, Jan P. Röer, Waldir M. Sampaio, Christoph Schild, Michael Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Ian D. Stephen, Peter Szecsi, Elizabeth Takacs, Julia N. Teeter, Elian H. Thiele-Evans, Julia Valeiro-Paterlini, Iris Vilares, Louise Villafana, Ke Wang, Raymond Wu, Sara Álvarez-Solas, Hannah Moshontz, Erin M. Buchanan. (2024) “Registered Replication Report: A Large Multilab Cross-Cultural Conceptual Replication of Turri et al. (2015).” Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science 7(4) October. https://doi.org/10.1177/25152459241267902 🔓

Article: A key theoretical component of the behavioral immune system is its functional flexibility, where an individual’s reaction to pathogenic stimuli is designed to fluctuate based on individual costs and benefits. For example, those who perceive themselves to be more vulnerable to disease or are in poorer health should react more aversely to possible pathogenic agents because of the higher costs of infection. To test this hypothesis, we collected measures of current individual health (i.e., self-reported general health and self-perceived infectibility) and three domains of disgust in two studies: an in-person sample of United States university students and a global online sample of diverse ages. We also collected and assayed saliva samples for secretory immunoglobulin A (sIgA), provided by the university students. Results showed that lower sIgA and higher perceived infectibility independently predicted higher pathogen disgust. Poor self-reported general health was associated with higher pathogen disgust in the university sample, but not in the online sample. Finally, pathogen disgust mediated the effect of perceived infectibility on behavioral avoidance motivation. Overall, our findings support the functional flexibility of the behavioral immune system, such that those who are more vulnerable to disease are more likely to respond aversely to situations with high pathogen load; however, future research should consider other contextual factors which affect the strength of this relationship between individuals and populations.

Hlay, Jessica, Graham Albert, Carlota Batres, George Richardson, Caitlyn Placek, Nicholas Landry, Steven Arnocky, Aaron D. Blackwell & Carolyn R. Hodges-Simeon. (2024) “Greater Self-reported Health is Associated with Lower Disgust: Evidence for Individual Calibration of the Behavioral Immune System.” Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology 10, 211–231. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-024-00243-4

Article: Previous studies have found a negative relationship between creativity and conservatism. However, as these studies were mostly conducted on samples of homogeneous nationality, the generalizability of the effect across different cultures is unknown. We addressed this gap by conducting a study in 28 countries. Based on the notion that attitudes can be shaped by both environmental and ecological factors, we hypothesized that parasite stress can also affect creativity and thus, its potential effects should be controlled for. The results of multilevel analyses showed that, as expected, conservatism was a significant predictor of lower creativity, adjusting for economic status, age, sex, education level, subjective susceptibility to disease, and country-level parasite stress. In addition, most of the variability in creativity was due to individual rather than country-level variance. Our study provides evidence for a weak but significant negative link between conservatism and creativity at the individual level (β = −0.08, p < .001) and no such effect when country-level conservatism was considered. We present our hypotheses considering previous findings on the behavioral immune system in humans.

Agata Groyecka-Bernard, Piotr Sorokowski, Maciej Karwowski, S. Craig Roberts, Toivo Aavik, Grace Akello, Charlotte Alm, Naumana Amjad, Kelly Asao, Chiemezie S. Atama, Derya Atamtürk Duyar, Richard Ayebare, Carlota Batres, Aicha Bensafia, Anna Bertoni, Boris Bizumic, Mahmoud Boussena, David M. Buss, Marina Butovskaya, Seda Can, Antonin Carrier, Hakan Cetinkaya, Daniel Conroy-Beam, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Ilona Croy, Rosa María Cueto, Marta Czerwonka, Marcin Czub, Silvia Donato, Daria Dronova, Seda Dural, Izzet Duyar, Berna Ertugrul, Agustín Espinosa, Carla Sofia Esteves, Tomasz Frackowiak, Aleksandra Gajda, Marta Galewska-Kustra, Jorge Contreras Graduño, Farida Guemaz, Ivana Hromatko, Chin-Ming Hui, Iskra Herak, Raffaella Iafrate, Jas Laile Jaafar, Dorota M. Jankowska, Feng Jiang, Konstantinos Kafetsios, Tina Kavčič, Nicolas O. Kervyn, Nils C. Köbis, Izabela Lebuda, Georgina R. Lennard, Ernesto León, Torun Lindholm, Mohammad Madallh Alhabahba, Zoi Manesi, Sarah L. McKerchar, Girishwar Misra, Conal Monaghan, Emanuel C. Mora, Alba Moya-Garófano, Bojan Musil, Jean Carlos Natividade, George Nizharadze, Elisabeth Oberzaucher, Anna Oleszkiewicz, Mohd Sofian Omar Fauzee, Ike E. Onyishi, Baris Özener, Farid Pazhoohi, Mariia Perun, Annette Pisanski, Katarzyna Pisanski, Edna Lúcia Tinoco Ponciano, Camelia Popa, Pavol Prokop, Muhammad Rizwan, Svjetlana Salkičević, Susanne Schmehl, Oksana Senyk, Shivantika Sharad, Franco Simonetti, Meri Tadinac, Karina Ugalde González, Olha Uhryn, Christin-Melanie Vauclair, Diego Vega, Ewa Weremczuk-Marczyńska, Dwi Ajeng Widarini, Gyesook Yoo, Maja Zupančič, Afifa Anjum, Anam Shahid, and Agnieszka Sorokowska. (2024). “Conservatism negatively predicts creativity: A study across 28 countries.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 55(4), 368–385. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221241238321 

Article: Both basic visual experience and cultural associations with race and ethnicity may contribute to the extent observers do or do not favor some facial ethnicity cues over others. Given that visual media contain a highly biased selection of faces, with Whiteness both over-represented and strongly privileged in film and television, communities for whom visual media are relatively novel may experience an additional, pervasive source of attitudes to facial ethnicity markers. In the current research, we compared individuals of Mestizo and Miskitu identities living in communities on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua with, and without, regular access to television on their relative preference for facial stimuli manipulated to look more or less White (Black vs White, Black vs Mestizo, Mestizo vs White). Results showed that all communities showed an overall preference for images with lighter skin, although changes in facial shape did not affect preferences. Those who had attended more years of education preferred whiter faces than those with less education, and those who watched more television preferred whiter faces more only where color (rather than shape) had been manipulated. Results are discussed in terms of the broader relations around ethnicity, status, and technological transition in this area.

J. -L. Jucker, T. Thornborrow, C. Batres, I. M. Penton-Voak, M. A. Jamieson, D. M. Burt, W. N. Bowie, M. J. Tovée, and L. G. Boothroyd. (2024) “Cultural Predictors of Facial Ethnicity Preference in the Miskitu and Mestizos of Rural Nicaragua.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 55(3), 292-307. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220221241232674 🔓 

Article: Fundamental frequency ( fo) is the most perceptually salient vocal acoustic parameter, yet little is known about how its perceptual influence varies across societies. We examined how fo affects key social perceptions and how socioecological variables modulate these effects in 2,647 adult listeners sampled from 44 locations across 22 nations. Low male fo increased men’s perceptions of formidability and prestige, especially in societies with higher homicide rates and greater relational mobility in which male intrasexual competition may be more intense and rapid identification of high-status competitors may be exigent. High female fo increased women’s perceptions of flirtatiousness where relational mobility was lower and threats to mating relationships may be greater. These results indicate that the influence of fo on social perceptions depends on socioecological variables, including those related to competition for status and mates. 

Aung, Toe , Alexander K. Hill, Jessica K. Hlay, Catherine Hess, Michael Hess, Janie Johnson, Leslie Doll, Sara M. Carlson, Caroline Magdinec, Isaac G-Santoyo, Robert S. Walker, Drew Bailey, Steven Arnocky, Shanmukh Kamble, Tom Vardy, Thanos Kyritsis, Quentin Atkinson, Benedict Jones, Jessica Burns, Jeremy Koster, Gonzalo Palomo-Vélez, Joshua M. Tybur, José Muñoz-Reyes, Bryan K. C. Choy, Norman P. Li, Verena Klar, Carlota Batres, Patricia Bascheck, Christoph Schild Lars Penke, Farid Pazhoohi, Karen Kemirembe, Jaroslava Varella Valentova, Marco Antonio Correa Varella, Caio Santos Alves da Silva, Martha Borras-Guevara, Carolyn Hodges-Simeon, Moritz Ernst, Collin Garr, Bin-Bin Chen, and David Puts (2024). “Effects of Voice Pitch on Social Perceptions Vary With Relational Mobility and Homicide Rate.” Psychological Science, 35(3), 250-262. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231222288 🔓 

Article: In this article, I examine how Alina Marazzi and Costanza Quatriglio deal with the world of haute couture and off-the-rack fashion, and with the turn to the archive in their documentaries. They construct feminist genealogies (between maternage and spectral sisterhood) in the fashion world and adopt different modalities of montage (between gleaning and détournement). In Anna Piaggi: una visionaria nella moda (‘Anna Piaggi: A fashion visionary’) (2016), Marazzi focuses on Anna Piaggi, a renowned fashion editor for Vogue Italia. In contrast, Costanza Quatriglio in Triangle (2014) centres her story on the 123 women textile workers, victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York in 1911, in counterpoint to her interview with Mariella Fasanella, the only survivor of a collapsed sweatshop in Barletta, Italy in 2011. The two filmmakers produce a short circuit in fashion films among feminist genealogies, archival constellations and women’s labour in the fashion industry, activating a feminist and ethical stance.

Stefania Benini. (2024). "Feminist genealogies, archival constellations and women’s labour in fashion films: Anna Piaggi: una visionaria nella moda (2016) and Triangle (2014)." Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 13: 1 & 2, April.  https://doi.org/10.1386/jicms_00253_1 

Conference Presentation/Poster: The revival of industrial hemp cultivation in Pennsylvania after nearly a century of absence poses unique challenges for the identification and management of soilborne diseases. In this study, we sampled soils from six industrial hemp production locations across south central PA at multiple time points during summer and fall of 2022, with an overall goal of assessing oomycete diversity and disease potential. Isolates of known pathogens, including Globisporangium irregulare, G. ultimum, and Pythium aphanidermatum were identified from both seed/fiber and CBD production fields. Focusing on G. irregulare, we assessed genetic diversity among the collected isolates using a combination of sequence analysis (COI, ITS) and nuclear microsatellite genotyping. To examine functional diversity, we performed seed germination assays using both soy and corn as potential hosts, as well as hairy vetch as a non-host control. Our results show high levels of genetic diversity among our G. irregulare isolates, with four major COI haplotypes and 4-7 alleles across four microsatellites, as well as variation in germination reduction across the isolates tested. We are currently examining the impact of community composition on germination reduction via co-inoculation experiments with G. irregulare and potential mycoparasites, G. acanthophoron and G. nunn. Overall this study advances our knowledge of oomycete diversity associated with industrial hemp under modern agricultural conditions. 

Hoang, Quyen & Jaime E. Blair. (2024) Student oral presentation, "Genetic and functional diversity of Globisporangium irregulare isolated from industrial hemp soils in south central PA." American Phytopathological Society Northeastern Division Annual Meeting, Ithaca NY, March 6-8.

Chapter: Research in conversational hand gesturing shows an array of philosophical senses of intersubjectivity. Gesturing is interpersonally rational, as demonstrated in studies linking gesturing to common ground achievements and effects and to markings of communicative intent. Gesturing is an ecological and interactional activity through which copresent interlocutors codetermine their own social and environmental relatings, building as well as attending to a shared world. Gesturing is an intercorporeal experience central to what it means to live as linguistic bodies. Taken together, research indicates that hand gesturing even as a variegated phenomenon offers insight into how language works. The full story of intersubjectivity and attendant features of recognition, interpretation, normativity, conventionality, and reference begins and ends with actual bodies interacting. As these matters concern the core of pragmatic philosophy, gesture research has radical relevance for all language theorists. An enactive approach to intersubjectivity and language offers a framework for making this case.

Cuffari, E. C. (2024). “Gesture and intersubjectivity.” The Cambridge handbook of gesture studies. A. Cienki, ed. Cambridge University Press: 599-615. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108638869.024 

Presentations: 

In classroom interactions that take place over video conferencing platforms, teachers and students continue to gesture, but their bodies are neither physically copresent nor fully visible to each other. Do instructor gestures help learning in this context, as has been found for in-person learning and for video-based learning in lab experiments? We showed professors lecturing spontaneously with unscripted co-speech gestures. In some conditions, we cropped the video so only the top half of the professor's gesture space is available, or removed the video altogether. Results from our betweensubjects experiment show that participants paid significantly more visual attention to the partial gesture condition than to stimuli where the gesturing was fully visible, and they scored significantly higher on an immediate comprehension test if they had seen lectures in the partially visible condition. This work raises further questions of how gestures help learning. 

Cuffari, E., Howard, L., Belka, A., Reilly, A., Samson, K., Sun, J., Huang, W., Zang, Z. (2024) Peer-reviewed poster: “A little goes a long way: How Gesture Visibility in Video Lectures Impacts Attention and Learning.” Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Rotterdam, July 24-27. https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-2024/ 

Sense-making for language users is qualitatively enlanguaged; gestures, even when non-communicative, are part of languaging behavior (Di Paolo et al., 2018; Cuffari, 2012). They make sense in an enactive and participatory way. What happens to the hand gesturing of teachers and students who are engaged in video-mediated interactions? Do the demonstrated pedagogical benefits of gesture change when bodies are neither physically copresent nor fully visible to each other? With an emphasis on mixed methodology, this talk will present findings from an original qualitative study of Zoom classroom recordings and a follow-up experimental study on partially visible gesturing. This empirical work is grounded in the enactive idea of linguistic bodies (Di Paolo et al., 2018), which I will also discuss, and carries implications for the questions of virtual co-presence and the issue of breakdowns in the interaction couplings that constitute participatory sense-making (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007).

Cuffari, E. (2024) Peer-reviewed panel submission: “Studying gesture in video-mediated classrooms: mixed methods, messy data, and enactive interpretations.” The Fifth Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics. Lund University, Sweden. August 15-18.  https://konferens.ht.lu.se/iacs-5/ 

What are the effects of techno-political situatedness on the ranges of semiotic possibility, on sense-making? How can we study them? Cognitive semiotics as an interdisciplinary field offers a set of methods, tools, and products that can illuminate shifts in meaning-making practices at different scales. In addition to seeking “underlying semiotic properties of the human mind and psyche as such, which are inseparable from the properties of basic human cognition,” Per Brandt included the goal of finding “the basic principles that allow us to us make sense (and even nonsense) of the world we live in” among “the challenging tasks that motivate what we call cognitive semiotics.” In this spirit, I’ll offer two moves that may help us to approach languaging in its technopolitical material context. The first reorients us to language ontologically as something dissociable from political configurations and struggles, something that “interpellates and constructs subjective attitudes rather than simply being a vehicle for communicative intentions” (Di Paolo et al., 2018). The second reorients us to language methodologically, by employing phenomenologically-inspired, participatory research techniques to study interaction wholes, or systems of participatory sense-making.

Cuffari, E. (2024) Invited plenary: “Autonomy, participation, and sense-making as sites of crisis: studying the technopolitical situatedness of linguistic bodies.” The Fifth Conference of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics. Lund University, Sweden. August 15-18. https://konferens.ht.lu.se/iacs-5/plenary-lecturers/plenary-talks/ 

The Women in Embodied Cognition Consortium gleefully invite creative, exploratory, and boundary-bashing thinkers to an international, transglobal, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary conference for all areas of 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive- also, ecological, environmental, and ethical). This conference will be dedicated to those who speak to, and from, a first-person perspective of a marginalized body knowledge.

Cuffari, E. (2024) Invited keynote: “Truth, language, and marginalization in practices of participation and power.” Marginalized Body Epistemologies and 4E Embodied Cognition Conference. Spelman College. Atlanta, GA. Oct 4-6. https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2024/09/09/marginalized-body-epistemologies-and-4e-embodied-cognition-oct-4-6-2024-spelman-online/ 

Book: The book argues that Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are not only a critical tool for protecting marine biodiversity in a changing climate, but they also play an important role at the intersection of geopolitics and environmental justice, and they provide a case study of environmental governance at the science-policy interface. The book takes an interdisciplinary and critical approach and builds on the author's two decades of experience working in this field.

De Santo, E.M. Securitizing Marine Protected Areas: Geopolitics, Environmental Justice, and Science. Routledge, 2024 https://www.routledge.com/Securitizing-Marine-Protected-Areas-Geopolitics-Environmental-Justice-and-Science/DeSanto/p/book/9781032040967 

Article: This article examines a 1954 case involving a cognitively disabled woman who was brought to court for neglecting her children. Due to her delinquent parenting, she was slated to undergo sterilization, but her legal incompetence raised a host of ethical questions that tested the psychiatrists’ and judicial authorities’ assumptions about cognitive competence, civic fitness, and reproductive autonomy. By examining contemporary press reports of the legal proceedings, their larger context, and their consequences, this article shows how the woman remained hostage to male-dominated power structures that devalued her dual status as a mother and as a cognitively impaired citizen.

Di Giulio, Marco. "Motherhood, Mental Incompetence, and the Denial of Reproductive Autonomy in the Early Years of Israeli Statehood." Journal of Social History 57, no. 4 (2024): 550-577. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad087 

Blog Post: In 1955, Israel’s parliament sought to reform the state’s outdated mental health legislation, a legacy of British colonial rule. Lawmaker Binyamin Avniel championed stronger powers for district psychiatrists, arguing that this measure was necessary to protect individuals with psychiatric disabilities from unscrupulous psychiatrists or manipulative family members (Knesset Proceedings, 1580). The specter of past abuses in Mandatory Palestine loomed large: Avniel recounted the case of psychiatrist Abraham Litvak, accused of locking up Ida Rubin, “a person who was not at all insane,” for alleged financial gain. While Avniel’s claim regarding Ida’s mental state cannot be verified, it underscores the dangers of medical authority. Ida’s story exposes the dark underbelly of medical power, which can undermine the autonomy and agency of vulnerable individuals, leaving them susceptible to exploitation.

Di Giulio, Marco. Blog post, "Beyond Silenced Voices: Gender, Power, and Psychiatric Care in Mandatory Palestine.” May 15, 2024. https://allofusdha.org/research/beyond-silenced-voices-gender-power-and-psychiatric-care-in-mandatory-palestine/ 🔓

Conference Presentation: This paper analyzes how Jewish disabled veterans who immigrated to Israel after serving with the Allied forces during WWII struggled to rebuild their lives and win recognition for their service in the new country. Their achievements in Europe were overshadowed by Israel’s defeat of its neighbors in 1948. This national victory created a new cohort of Israeli veterans who were celebrated for their service within the nascent state and who displaced European veterans in the popular imagination. The Knesset’s attempt to establish a veterans’ disability program in the early 1950s led to vigorous debates over the allocation of resources to veterans who served abroad and veterans who served in Israel. Disabilities received during the War of Independence symbolized sacrifice for a homeland, while disabilities incurred while fighting Nazis held less weight in the context of nation-building. By centering the experiences of disabled veterans who served outside the dominant Israeli narrative of heroism, this paper uses archival sources, memoirs, and Knesset proceedings to analyze the complex ways the young nation grappled with wartime experiences that challenged its emerging national identity. In doing so, it complicates the notion of a singular disability experience within a nation built on a localized land-based vision of wartime service. 

Di Giulio, Marco. “Wounded Bodies, Fractured Narratives: Disability Benefits and the Contested Nature of WWII Heroism in Israel.” Conference presentation at Association for Jewish Studies 56th Annual Conference, December 15–19, 2024. 

Chapter: This essay argues that, by centering women’s bodies, writer Natalia Ginzburg returns to her female characters the substance that is denied to them by men’s indifferent gazes. Situating her analysis within the feminist coordinates of work by Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Toril Moi, the chapter investigates the female characters’ bodies across Ginzburg’s fiction as sites of contestation and resistance against the gendered expectations of family and society. Ultimately, this chapter contends that Ginzburg’s poetics, grounded in the materiality of quotidian life and embodied experiences, offer a powerful critique of patriarchal institutions, thereby laying the foundation of women’s liberation.

Faleschini Lerner, Giovanna. "Women’s Bodies in Natalia Ginzburg’s Fiction." In Natalia Ginzburg's Global Legacies, eds. Stiliana Milkova Rousseva and Saskia Elizabeth Ziolkowski. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 91-110. 

Conference Presentation/Poster: This paper focuses on the work of Afrodescendant women film artists, in order to examine the strategies they employ to center the marginal perspectives of both historical and contemporary Afrodescendant Italians. Through an analysis of Daphne Di Cinto’s The Moor (2021), and Nadia Kibout’s Le ali velate (2015), I showed how these filmmakers, despite very different esthetic and narrative approaches, challenge facile assumptions about ideology, contents, and genre, and mark a shift in the positioning of Afrodescendant artists in the Italian cultural landscape. They reclaim for themselves the right to tell their own stories as well as any stories, and thus assert their own creative agency and the power to shape Italian cinema in truly novel, intersectional and transnational directions.

Faleschini Lerner, Giovanna. (2024) “Afrodescendant Women Behind the Movie Camera in Italy.” Conference Paper. Presented at The Right to Be (Seen): Afrodescendant Women Artists in Italy and Beyond National Borders, NEH Symposium, Bucknell University, October 24-26.

Conference Presentation/Poster: In this paper, I take an eco-critical approach to Spanish filmmaker Maite Vitoria Daneris’ award-winning documentary, El lugar de las fresas (Il posto delle fragole) (2013), to explore the histories of the plants that populate the agricultural landscapes of Piedmont and their participation in the networks of transnational mobility that have crisscrossed the oceans and seas for centuries. The mobility and adaptability of seeds and plants both reflect and enable the adaptability and mobility of people, in a web of connectivity that goes often unexplored. In Daneris’ film, this interconnectedness is, first, narrative, insofar as it spotlights the growing relationship between the filmmaker, Lina—a farmer in her seventies who sells her produce at the Porta Palazzo market in Turin—and Hassan—a 35-years-old Moroccan migrant, who starts working for Lina and comes to embody, for her and her husband, the future of a centuries-old local agricultural tradition. The interweaving of different strands of mobility and rootedness is also stylistic and structural, as the film is steeped in the transnational dimensions of “polyglot cinema.” This multi-ethnic, multi-cultural dimension of the film is underscored by Andrea Gattico’s original music, performed by the multi-national Orchestra of Porta Palazzo. The Spanish-language voiceover is accompanied by dialogues in Italian, Piedmontese, and some Arabic. An eco-critical approach allows me to argue that the transnational dimension of this film is deeply rooted in the metaphoric and concrete flourishing of the plants that the characters cultivate as they attempt to ground themselves in the lands they inhabit.  

Faleschini Lerner, Giovanna. (2024) Panel presentation, “Rooting a Transnational Future: El lugar de las fresas (2013) by Maite Vitoria Daneris” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 4th International Conference, “Re-examining the past and envisioning the future of Italian cinema and media” American University of Rome (Italy), June 13-15. https://aur.edu/news/re-examining-past-and-envisioning-future-italian-cinema-and-media

Conference Presentation/Poster: This panel invites participants to explore the life and works of Afrodescendant women who contribute to the enrichment of Italian culture as writers, filmmakers, actresses, activists, and influencers in Italy and beyond. Racial and gender biases often become privileged subjects of their activities, and offer a critical site to reflect on the need of further social and political change. Their collective experience is seen in light of a transnational spatial and temporal continuity between people of African descent in Italy and in the diasporic communities around the world. A transnational and intersectional approach and/or study cases are particularly welcome. 

Faleschini Lerner, Giovanna. (2024) Panel presentation, “Planting Oneself in a New Land: Andrea Segre’s Ibi.” AAIS Annual Conference, Sorrento, Italy, June 6-9. https://aais.italianstudies.net/site_page.cfm?pk_association_webpage_menu=11087&pk_association_webpage=26518

Conference Presentation/Poster: In this paper, I discuss the history of the Archivio delle Memorie Migranti in Rome and its role in supporting migrant audiovisual self-narrations. In particular, I analyze Dag Yimer's Va' pensiero, CARA Italia, and Soltanto il mare, Mohamed Zakaria Ali's To Whom It May Concern, and the five-director collaboration Benvenuti in Italia, all documentaries from the 2010s that elevate migrant voices and reclaim narrative agency in framing stories of displacement, diaspora, and migration. In looking at these documentaries, I consider the centrality of language, including Yimer's titles and the ways in which they stake a claim to Italian cultural patrimony; the issue of bureaucratic dehumanization; and analyze in depth the question of access and genre. The audiovisual narrative tools that migrant filmmakers have access to, that is, tend to be documentary in nature; this has implications at the level of funding, marketing, and distribution, that often do not afford them the broad audiences that could effectively generate a cultural and social change in mentality and approaches to thinking about migration, migrant rights, citizenship, and belonging.  

Faleschini Lerner, Giovanna. (2024) Online panel presentation, “Migrant Documentary Filmmakers Beyond the Archive of Migrant Memories in Italy.” Migrant Voices in Contemporary European Cinema International Conference, University of Kent, UK, April 17-19. https://research.kent.ac.uk/migrant-cinema/

Article: Hydration dynamics and solvent viscosity play critical roles in the structure and function of biomolecules. An overwhelming body of evidence suggests that protein and membrane fluctuations are closely linked to solvent fluctuations. While extensive research exists on the use of vibrational probes to detect local interactions and solvent dynamics, fewer studies have explored how the behavior of these reporters changes in response to bulk viscosity. To address this gap, two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy (2D IR) was employed in this study to investigate the ultrafast hydration dynamics around a cyanamide (NCN) probe attached to a nucleoside, deoxycytidine, in aqueous solutions with varying glycerol content. The use of a small vibrational probe on a targeted nucleic acid offers the potential to capture more localized hydration dynamics than alternative methods. The time scales for the frequency correlation decays were found to increase linearly with bulk viscosity, ranging from 0.9 to 11.4 ps over viscosities of 0.96–49.1 cP. Additionally, molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were performed to model the local hydration dynamics around the NCN probe. Interestingly, increasing the glycerol content did not significantly alter the hydration of the deoxycytidine. The MD simulations further suggested that the NCN probe’s frequency fluctuations were primarily influenced by the dynamics of water in the second solvation shell. Cage correlation functions, which measure the movement of water molecules in and out of the second solvation shell, exhibited decays that closely matched those of the frequency-fluctuation correlation function (FFCF). These findings offer new insights into hydration dynamics and the impact of viscosity on biological systems.

Christopher J. Mallon, Majid Hassani, Ellia H. Osofsky, Savannah B. Familo, Edward E. Fenlon, and Matthew J. Tucker. "Unraveling Hydration Shell Dynamics and Viscosity Effects Around Cyanamide Probes via 2D IR Spectroscopy.” Journal of the American Chemical Society Published online December 19, 2024. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.4c12716#

Article: Wildfire activity is increasing globally. The resulting smoke plumes can travel hundreds to thousands of kilometers, reflecting or scattering sunlight and depositing particles within ecosystems. Several key physical, chemical, and biological processes in lakes are controlled by factors affected by smoke. The spatial and temporal scales of lake exposure to smoke are extensive and under-recognized. We introduce the concept of the lake smoke-day, or the number of days any given lake is exposed to smoke in any given fire season, and quantify the total lake smoke-day exposure in North America from 2019 to 2021. Because smoke can be transported at continental to intercontinental scales, even regions that may not typically experience direct burning of landscapes by wildfire are at risk of smoke exposure. We found that 99.3% of North America was covered by smoke, affecting a total of 1,333,687 lakes ≥10 ha. An incredible 98.9% of lakes experienced at least 10 smoke-days a year, with 89.6% of lakes receiving over 30 lake smoke-days, and lakes in some regions experiencing up to 4 months of cumulative smoke-days. Herein we review the mechanisms through which smoke and ash can affect lakes by altering the amount and spectral composition of incoming solar radiation and depositing carbon, nutrients, or toxic compounds that could alter chemical conditions and impact biota. We develop a conceptual framework that synthesizes known and theoretical impacts of smoke on lakes to guide future research. Finally, we identify emerging research priorities that can help us better understand how lakes will be affected by smoke as wildfire activity increases due to climate change and other anthropogenic activities.

Farruggia, M.J., Brahney, J, Tanentzap, A.J., Brentrup, J.A., Brighenti, L.S., Chandra, S., Cortés, A., Fernandez, R.L., Fischer, J.M., Forrest, A.L., Jin, Y., Larrieu, K., McCullough, I.M., Oleksy, I.A., Pilla, R.M., Rusak, J.A., Scordo, F., Smits, A.P., Symons, C.C., Tang, M., Woodman, S.G., and S. Sadro. (2024) “Wildfire smoke impacts lake ecosystems.” Global Change Biology 30: e17367. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01404-9 🔓

Article: I argue that the Republic IX ‘Authority Argument’ (580d3-583a10) embraces both subjectivity of hedonic experience and objectivity of hedonic character. This combination of views undermines the interpretations of both the argument’s main critics and its main defenders. A more adequate interpretation, drawing on the idea of inapt hedonic experiences which fail to reflect the pleasantness of their objects, points towards a reassessment of the Argument’s place in the sequence ending Bk. IX. On the view presented here, the ‘Authority Argument’ is not a stand-alone argument, but depends on the ‘Olympian Argument’ that follows it.

Franklin, Lee. (2024) "Pleasure and Subjectivity in the Republic IX ‘Authority Argument’(580d3-583a10)." PLATO JOURNAL 25: 79-94. https://doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_25_6 🔓

Book: Quebec’s early novels are full of sacred themes and motifs – devotional objects and practices, parables and scripture, priests and nuns, transcendence, divinity, and eternity. Yet the critical gaze of the past fifty years has seldom engaged the idea of the sacred in a sustained way. Indeed the presence of the sacred has alienated modern and postmodern readers who ignore or downplay its significance, leading to misguided assessments of these works as mediocre and even unreadable for contemporary audiences.

The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec reexamines seven classic novels at the foundations of Quebec’s national literature: Patrice Lacombe’s La Terre paternelle (1846), P.-J.-O. Chauveau’s Charles Guérin (1853), Antoine Gérin-Lajoie’s Jean Rivard (1874), Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Les Anciens Canadiens (1863), Laure Conan’s Angéline de Montbrun (1884), Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1916), and Félix-Antoine Savard’s Menaud, maître-draveur (1937). Through chapters that focus on sacred themes, character analysis, narrative temporalities, and the hermeneutics of the sacred, Lisa Gasbarrone demonstrates that these novels are more nuanced and innovative than their reputation has allowed.

The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec reintroduces readers to classic works of French-Canadian literature that ironically and provocatively cast their quarrel with modernity in that essentially modern form: the novel.

Gasbarrone, Lisa. (2024) The Sense of the Sacred in the Early Novels of Quebec. McGill-Queen's University Press. 

Article: “Taxonomy of an Enslaved Heart” opens up the figuration of heartache, so common to sentimental writings, to consider how it can signify anatomical pain as well. What does it mean to read figuratively—accepting that every instance of a heart broken or throbbing or heavy indexes emotional pain addressing the reader’s sympathy—and, at the same time, to literalize these instances, so that each one refers to a specific episode in the history of a circulatory system? This essay attempts to hold both in tension, even as they resist each other. Attending to texts by Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Sojourner Truth, and James Baldwin, the essay argues for what it calls the story of the heart: a minoritized account of pain that deforms sentimental language to register at once somatically, mentally, and intersubjectively. Because of its insecure legibility, the story of the heart subverts the biopolitical logic of legitimacy that traps many patients who are Black, disabled, or both today. What emerges from holding figuration with literalization subtly shifts the illnesses we know and the conditions by which we know them.

Goldberg, Shari. (2024) "Taxonomy of an Enslaved Heart." American Literature 96.2: 163-186.

Article: Birding for nature conservation becomes violent in war when foreign states and industry use it to extract value from countries like Iraq. In wartime Iraq, birding became a pathway to multinational resource extraction by producing “eco-value,” a form of economic value for species life and, by extension, the ecosystems they inhabit. Iraqi marshland conservationists, including private contractors, produced eco-value in the context of extreme violence for the purposes of environmental rehabilitation. This eco-value was then leveraged to mine natural resources that were embedded in the same geological field. Compounding the violence of extraction was the violence conservation introduced for Iraqi citizens who alone performed the dangerous labor of birding; they were recruited to do this in order to safeguard the lives of foreign experts, who did not travel to the marshes of Iraq. The result was a form of nature conservation that made Iraqi lives uniquely expendable in the project of building the occupation's lifeforce.

Guarasci, Bridget. (2024) "Birding Under Fire: Ecological Violence and Value in Iraq." American Ethnologist 51(2): 246-257. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13279

Chapter: The history of political thought occupies an uneasy status between two fields that do not always agree on either their methodology or their aims: political history, which seeks to reconstruct the actions and motivations of political actors, and political thought, which mines the past for conceptualizations of the dimensions of community life. In the case of the Romans, history and political thought parted company in the twentieth century, in large part because political theorists came to see the Romans as too bound up in history and displaying little of the originality, transcendence, and systematizing genius associated with Greek political thought. That assessment has changed as scholars have revised how we think about the connection between history and concepts. In particular, there is a new appreciation of how concepts acquire richness and form through the sedimentation of practices, ideas, debates, experiences, and responses to events. I look at four directions in reassessments of the history of Roman political thought: neo-Romanism, constitutionalism, political philosophy, and theoretical approaches that identified conceptual practices embedded in rhetoric, the experiences of bodies, and configurations of space and time.

Hammer, Dean. (2024) “Research Directions in the History of Roman Political Thought,” Research Handbook on the History of Political Thought, eds. Cary Nederman and Guillame Bogiaris. Northampton: Elgar: p.189-198. http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800373808

Creative Works: Titles of three canvases painted at the Great Camp Sagamore, NY:

• George’s Place - Acrylic and Watercolor Pencils - 2024

• Swimming Hole - Acrylic - 2024

• A Room With A View - Acrylic and Watercolor Pencils - 2023

I first started painting in the Adirondacks at the Great Camp Sagamore En Plein Air “Arts in the Adirondacks” workshop in 2016. My work-colleague and now fellow-artist and I had both recently divorced and we decided that the Sagamore workshop would be good for us.  As a city person, I am not an outdoor enthusiast. There are bees, bugs, and bears in nature! At camp we were encouraged to explore what we see and like in nature, with no pressure. The crisp clean air and quietness of nature felt good to the soul. Although during that first year, almost all of my paintings were done while sitting on a lovely screened or unscreened porch, the peacefulness was delightful. The painting “A Room With A View” was originally completed that year from the screened window of the upstairs bathroom in Collins Lodge so that I would not have to deal with nature.  Last year, I painted that same view again from my bedroom window on a rainy day at the camp - this was one of the pieces I placed in the show.  I now venture out to the beach, and explore the Adirondack trails. I will even hop in a canoe, with a guide of course, and explore the lovely views from the lake and listen to the morning songs of the loon.  

At Sagamore, I focus on the edges and curves of the buildings against their background. As I painted George’s Place, I got lost in the simple shades and shapes of the stones that hold up the building, and the natural stripping of the wooden logs that hug the porch. I wonder about the hands that built the structure - are these ancestors with us now as we enjoy their work? In the “Swimming Hole,”  I take in the glory of the still-as-glass nature of the lake’s reflections. I visually zoom into the brown, square-box launch pad on the swimming hole gently floating, lonely, waiting for someone to jump off and splash to bring the water to life.  

Movement in my still-life pieces is often present but not seen. As I paint, I think about the way the work sits in my heart, my vision, and on canvas. Painting has become a mix of therapy, wrapped in a blanket of curiosity and mystique. Why does the background shimmer but the foreground is calm? Why is the piece centered or not centered? How does the piece move, or grab, or sit? As those questions wave through the head and the heart, I hope the viewer can find the movement in my work. It can be peaceful, or powerful, and is always fully present. 

Hathaway, Gretchel. (2024) Art Exhibit: Three 'en plein air' Adirondack art pieces: “George’s Place.” (Acrylic and Watercolor Pencils - 2024), “Swimming Hole.” (Acrylic - 2024), “A Room With A View.” (Acrylic - 2023). Accepted and displayed at the Kelly Adirondack Center, Niskayuna NY. Exhibition title: Inspired by Nature: En Plein Air Painting at Great Camp Sagamore. On display from November 6 2024 - April 4, 2025 https://muse.union.edu/adirondack/2024/09/24/inspired-by-nature-en-plein-air-painting-at-great-camp-sagamore/

Article: Avec La petite dernière, Fatima Daas propose une exégèse de l’hétérogénéité d’où émerge un être singulier et pluriel dont les différentes facettes, telles les nombreuses tesselles d’une mosaïque, s’imbriquent, plutôt que de s’opposer, dans une existence avec les autres. Daas nous exhorte à repenser l’identité au-delà des bipolarismes et entreprend de négocier la subjectivité dans un mode de départenance mis en lumière, d’une part, par la dissidence explicite et implicite du “je” dans une distanciation des automatismes imposés par les normes sociétales. Cette subjectivité prend forme, d’autre part, à travers une poétique de l’ubiquité que révèle une esthétique de la fragmentation et de la simultanéité qui permet au “je” d’être tout et partout à la fois. Ainsi, si les divers visages de la narratrice/ autrice semblent antithétiques aux yeux des autres, il n’en est rien pour Fatima/Daas qui ne renoncera ni à sa famille, ni à ses amantes, ni à ses croyances spirituelles, ni à son origine algérienne, ni à sa culture française, ni à son vécu en banlieue, ni à sa vie parisienne. Pour Daas, réconcilier ces identités importe peu ou pas du tout. Il s’agit avant tout de se réconcilier avec soi-même, de s’aimer dans sa pluralité et d’aimer l’Autre dans une existence avec les autres. Aussi, le texte de Fatima Daas devrait-il donc se lire avant tout comme un hymne à l’amour, ou plutôt comme un hymne aux amours: philautia ou l’amour de soi, philia ou l’amour des autres, eros ou l’amour des femmes, storgé ou l’amour de la famille, agape ou l’amour de Dieu.

Hebouche, Nadra. (2024) "Écriture d'une identité hétérogène chez Fatima Daas: Le "je" de la départenance et de l'ubiquité dans La petite dernière." The French Review 97 (3): 71–85. https://doi.org/10.1353/tfr.2024.a919992 

Book: The Stuff of Hollywood is a meditation on the pervasiveness of violence in America. In this book-length poem, Niki Herd relies on various modes—images, prose, and lyric and documentary poems—to reflect upon the quotidian nature of gun culture, police killings, and political unrest. From a busy Waffle House, to a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, to an Uber ride down a Chicago street, readers are placed in various “film” locations and watch as America becomes a character in its own absurd movie. In one section, excerpted language from the continuity script of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation is juxtaposed with text from the January 6 congressional hearings, suggesting a fragile line between real and engineered brutality. Herd interrogates empire and the ways in which violence is consumed and normalized. The Stuff of Hollywood is an elegy for a country that never existed beyond the screen.

Herd, Niki. (2024)  The Stuff of Hollywood. Copper Canyon Press. https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/the-stuff-of-hollywood-by-niki-herd/ 

Article: For more than twenty years, fans have gathered annually in Castle Stahleck, Bacharach, Germany, to play Middle-earth: The Collectible Card Game, based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary mythology. I describe my experience attending this gathering and examine the game’s significance in my life, particularly in relation to my identity as a Third Culture Kid, a U.S. citizen having grown up in Senegal. The concept of home can be difficult and complex for TCKs, who often struggle to answer the question “where are you from?” In this essay, I analyze how fandom, fanship, and nostalgia have intersected with my TCK identity to provide a non-place-based home in Middle-earth. The game has accompanied me throughout life, helping me carry a sense of home with me, regardless of geographical location.

Hopkins, Justin B. (2024) “Lured Home, and Back Again: How Fanship, Fandom, and Nostalgia Led a Third Culture Kid to Middle-earth.” Journal of Autoethnography 5 (2): 160–180. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2024.5.2.160 

Article: In this autoethnography, I describe and analyse my serious leisure career playing X-Wing: The Miniatures Game. I focus on the beginning and the end of that career, as Stebbins (2020) has called for more research into those leisure career stages. More specifically, I identify leisure facilitators and constraints, demonstrating how my Star Wars fanship first facilitated my engagement with X-Wing, then how the variable factor of (un)available leisure time initially constrained but later facilitated my participation. Finally, I reflect on my career’s decline and consider the implications of abandoning X-Wing altogether.

Hopkins, Justin B. (2024) “Flying casual: a serious leisure career playing X-Wing: The Miniatures Game.” Leisure Studies: 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2024.2320364 

Conference Presentation/Poster: Flat origami refers to the folding of flat, zero-curvature paper such that the finished object lies in a plane. Mathematically, flat origami consists of a continuous, piecewise isometric map f on a region P of the plane along with a layer ordering L that tracks which points of P are above/below others when folded. The set of crease lines that a flat origami makes (i.e., the set on which the mapping f is non-differentiable) is called its crease pattern. Flat origami mappings and their layer orderings can possess surprisingly intricate structure. For instance, determining whether or not a given straight-line planar graph drawn on P is the crease pattern for some flat origami has been shown to be an NP-complete problem, and this result from 1996 led to numerous explorations in computational aspects of flat origami. In this presentation we prove that flat origami, when viewed as a computational device, is Turing complete. We do this by showing that flat origami crease patterns with optional creases (creases that might be folded or remain unfolded depending on constraints imposed by other creases or inputs) can be constructed to simulate Rule 110, a one-dimensional cellular automaton that was proven to be Turing complete by Matthew Cook in 2004. 

Hull, Thomas and Inna Zakharevich. (2024) “Flat origami is Turing complete.” AMS Special Session on Recreational Mathematics, Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Francisco, January 3-6, 2024. 

Editorial: This editorial talked about Donald Trump's historically-unprecedented attacks on faith in the democratic process.

Kaliss, Gregory. (2024) "A Different Kind of Faith Under Attack by Trump," LancasterOnline August 4. https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/a-different-kind-of-faith-under-attack-by-trump-column/article_d38d5526-50c8-11ef-bd1f-9ff9df9bdd5a.html 

Editorial: This editorial used the conclusion of the Paris Olympics to think through the prominent achievements, technological changes, and controversies regarding social issues manifested in the games.

Kaliss, Gregory. (2024) "The past, present, and future unfurl at the Paris games," LancasterOnline, August 11, 2024. https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/the-past-present-and-future-unfurl-at-the-paris-games-column/article_269013ba-5643-11ef-a1ac-e3ecdd8117dc.html 

Book: From prince to prisoner, Li Yu (937-978) ruled briefly over his family’s Southern Tang kingdom before he was taken prisoner by the powerful and warlike Northern Song dynasty. This vivid arc, from rule to ruin, is reflected in his poetry. Ineffectual as a ruler, he loved and celebrated court life, with its parties, dancing, drinking, and trysts. Later, having lost his kingdom, he came to know sorrow, homesickness, and the need to reconcile his melancholy with the passage of seasons and the fragility of life.

Kent, Rick. (2024) Editor of Spring Flowers, Autumn Moon: The Poems of Li Yu (Li Houzhu). Translated by Jiann I. Lin and David Young. Montrose, CO: Pinyon Publishing. http://www.pinyon-publishing.com/springflowersautumnmoon.html

Creative Works: 

Juried exhibition; one work selected: Windblown Page--Reading Meng Haoran on a Mid-October Day

Juror's Statement (Jeff Curto):

Everyone loves a good story. More importantly, everyone loves a good storyteller. I believe that storytelling is a critical element of photography and mainly because great photographs share at least one common element with great stories - time. As I reviewed the photographs submitted for the “Traces” exhibition, I thought a lot about time and how the passage of time before, during or after the exposure can tell a story. Just as in every great story, every great photograph requires excellence in idea and execution. For me, the images that rose to the top provided a combination of conceptual elegance as well as technical excellence in terms of a craftsman’s attention to detail regarding exposure and careful framing.

Kent, Rick. (2024) PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, VT: Traces (Juror: Jeff Curto, photographer and Professor Emeritus of Photography at College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois), March 8-29; One work selected: “Windblown Page--Reading Meng Haoran on a Mid-October Day.” https://photoplacegallery.com/online-juried-shows/traces-2/detail

A Juried look at Contemporary Photography:  Our 10th International Open Call exhibition will open on March 21st as a showcase for contemporary photography as complied by Karen Haas, Lane Senior Curator of Photographs, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  The work in this exhibition was selected from an international call for entries to provide an updated look at current photographic practice. The 60 photographs selected were drawn from a pool of almost 1000 images to create this exhibition and we would like to thank everyone who submitted work for consideration. In the end, the exhibition brings together the work of 60 photographers from  20 States and Washington DC to be a part of our 10th Open Call Exhibition. We are excited to be able to continue this annual exhibition, providing the opportunity to bring the work of so many new photographers to Providence. 

Kent, Rick. (2024) Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Providence, RI: Tenth International Call (Juror: Karen Haas, Lane Senior Curator of Photographs, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA), March 21-April 12; One work selected: Forager, from the series Patch of Woods, archival pigment print. https://www.riphotocenter.org/a-conversation-with-karen-haas/

This exhibition presents the work of the prizewinners of the 2024 International Photography Competition, organized annually by Photo Review, a critical journal of national scope and international readership. This year’s Photo Review International Photography Competition will be juried by Joel Smith, the Richard L. Menschel Curator and Department Head in Photography at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

Kent, Rick. (2024) Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA: The Photo Review: “Best of Show”; Recipient of 18th Award. (Juror: Joel Smith, curator of photographs, The Morgan Library, NY, NY), August 3-October 27; Title of Photograph: ”HC Rd, Sign #11, 7X” from the series, Lessons in Recursion. https://woodmereartmuseum.org/experience/exhibitions/the-photo-review-best-of-show-2024

Multimedia Project: Lancaster Vice, a multi-media public history project, launched in 2024. It includes a podcast, walking tour, blog, and newspaper series. It focuses on the history of commercial sex, gambling, and drinking (“vice”) over a century ago in Lancaster. Around 1900, Lancaster was infamous as a “wide open” city for vice. Police and city officials encouraged and even participated in vice. 

Kibler, M. Alison, and contributors to the multimedia project include: Dylan Sykes, Jaden LaCoe, and Rachel Rubins. (2024) Lancaster Vice: Our Past Underworld. https://lancastervice.com/ 🔓

Articles: 

Kibler, M. Alison. (2024) “Sex and Our City” series in LNP/LancasterOnline , Sex and Our City, Part 1: Seeking to illuminate Lancaster’s seedy past. March 24. https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/sex-and-our-city-part-1-seeking-to-illuminate-lancaster-s-seedy-past-column/article_16e5a852-e83f-11ee-868a-c377f075533a.html

Kibler, M. Alison. (2024) Sex and Our City, Part 2: Anti-vice campaigners target dance halls, movie houses and sex work. April 21.  https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/sex-and-our-city-part-2-anti-vice-campaigners-target-dance-halls-movie-houses-and/article_f815b882-fdaa-11ee-934f-6705bf7ff95c.html

Kibler, M. Alison.  (2024) Sex and Our City, Part 3: Vice generated profits for property owners in Lancaster. June 9.. https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/sex-and-our-city-part-3-vice-generated-profits-for-property-owners-in-lancaster-column/article_23c137f2-2413-11ef-bff0-830b4964deee.html

Kibler, M. Alison.  (2024) Sex and Our City, Part 4: Crackdown on commercial sex sends it outside Lancaster. July 7.  https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/sex-and-our-city-part-4-crackdown-on-commercial-sex-sends-it-outside-lancaster-city/article_1a9f0920-3966-11ef-b91a-53cd171e8b6f.html

Kibler, M. Alison.  (2024) Sex and Our City, Part 5: How racism shaped commercial sex in early 1900s Lancaster. September 22. https://lancasteronline.com/opinion/columnists/sex-and-our-city-part-5-how-racism-shaped-commercial-sex-in-early-1900s-lancaster/article_c61e9df4-7680-11ef-b765-7b2cb2545d43.html 

Article: An idealized notion of antiquity informed the construction of Modern Greece. Archaeology’s objective was to materialize the western classical heritage by freeing it up from medieval accretions. Neoclassicism’s perspective of a single golden period came into increasing conflict with a diachronic sense of history developed by British medievalists. The ideal of layered accumulation articulated by John Ruskin, the ethos of imperfect craft practiced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, and the preservation principles developed by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings conspired against the classical heritage. Impure Venice symbolized the foil to pure Athens. The architects of the Byzantine Research Fund brought the ethics of Venice to a hostile Athens. The medieval house, which had been indiscriminately destroyed by archaeologists, needed to be rehabilitated by fresh domestic research. In 1909 Walter S. George’s surveyed three houses at medieval Mystras, while working for the excavations in nearby Sparta. George’s unpublished drawings illustrate a departure from French and Greek scholarship on the site. Combining the Ruskinian ideals of his mentor W. R. Lethaby with new stratigraphic lessons learned in Sparta, George developed a critical voice in medieval archaeology. This voice is also evident in Ramsay Traquair, who pioneered the study of vernacular architecture in Canada after his experiences at the Byzantine Research Fund. Rhys Carpenter, director of the American School in Athens, applied this critical voice in the excavation of medieval Corinth. Ruskin had little impact in Greek intellectual circles until the 1930s. His shadow, however, seems to have been already cast a generation earlier through the prominence that British architects placed on the medieval house.

Kourelis, Kostis. (2024) “Walter S. George and the Byzantine House: Ruskin’s Greek Shadow,” in Byzantium and British Heritage: Byzantine Influences on the Arts and Crafts Movement, ed. Amalia G. Kakissis, pp. 159-188, New York: Routledge. 

Book Review: 

Kourelis, Kostis. (2024)  Book Review, The Byzantine Neighborhood: Urban Space and Political Action, by Fotini Kondyli and Benjamin Anderson eds., Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 99, no. 1: 235-237. 

Conference Presentation/Poster:

Kourelis, Kostis. (2024) “American Race: A Philadelphia Story.” Presented at Stavros Niarchos Foundation Paideia Program and the Asian America Across the Disciplines Series, University of Pennsylvania, March 26, 2024. https://asam.sas.upenn.edu/events/2024/03/26/asian-american-across-disciplines-kostis-kourelis 

Conference Presentation/Poster: Greek immigration to the United States was one of the most significant demographic movements for modern Greece. The migration also played an important role in shaping immigrant communities in southeastern Pennsylvania. In Harrisburg, the city’s urban reformers promised better housing and living conditions for all of the city’s residents, but the demolition of the Old Eighth Ward and the construction of more expensive housing between 1910 and 1930 made it harder for new Greek immigrants to make a living and a home in the city. However, Greeks coming to Lancaster during the early 20th century found a relatively stable city that experienced neither the rapid growth nor the major upheavals of urbanization. Kourelis will discuss his research and the demographic and geospatial data for Greek immigrant communities in Harrisburg and Lancaster to highlight the different challenges and opportunities of Greek community during the era of City Beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjihqs1Bngc

Kourelis, Kostis. (2024) “Urban Metabolism: Greek Immigrants and the Progressive Era in Southeastern PA,” Presentation, LancasterHistory.org, Lancaster, Pa., December 7, 2024. 

Conference Presentation/Poster: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Excavations of the Athenian Agora are organizing the exhibition entitled "Vrysaki: The Revival of a Neighborhood through the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens," curated by Sylvie Dumont.

A large part of this neighborhood, where the archaeological site of the ancient Agora now stands, was expropriated to conduct excavations aimed at uncovering the civic center of the world’s first democracy and the commercial marketplace of the ancient city.

The exhibition, designed by the team of Mikri Arktos (Vivi Gerolymatou and Andreas Georgiadis), highlights the important role of archival collections in our understanding of "Old Athens" in general, and the neighborhood known as Vrysaki more specifically. 

Vrysaki and its history is revived through six thematic sections before and after the excavations of the American School in 1931, from Ottoman times to the period after the Second World War. The form and architecture of its buildings, streets, squares, bridges, churches, scenes of daily life, refugee facilities and archaeological excavations are presented. The exhibits will include architectural elements of the houses that were demolished, archaeological finds from the excavations, objects from the daily life of the inhabitants, some of which were also used to store the antiquities (such as shoe and cigarette boxes, and tins) and will be accompanied by audiovisual material.

The exhibition will be held at the exhibition space of the American School, the Ioannis Makriyannis Wing, from June 18 to August 3 and from September 4 to November 17, 2024. Various events, including lectures, and other activities are being planned.

Kourelis, Kostis. (2024) “The Incidental Archaeology of Greek Modernity in the Athenian Agora: Archaeologies of Petroleum.” Keynote, exhibition opening, Vrysaki: The Revival of a Neighborhood, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece, June 18, 2024. https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/events/details/vrysaki-the-revival-of-a-neighborhood#YouTube 

Conference Presentation/Poster: Mindset impacts EVERYTHING from shaping your reality to influencing your decisions to determining your success. What’s going on in your head has a significant impact on your major gift closures. The positivity or negativity of your thoughts, emotions, and actions around money, philanthropy, prospects, and your institution form the mindset and lens through which you see and do your work.

In this session, we will investigate what makes up your Major Gift Mindset and how it influences your performance. You’ll identify your mindset, ways to recognize how your inner monologue supports or sabotages your work, and learn actions to align your mindset with your performance goals. The conversation will help you develop heightened self awareness by understanding where your relationship with money falls on the scarcity - abundance scale and how your perceptions of wealth influence your thoughts, emotions, and actions during your major gift work. By the end of the session, you’ll recognize the role your mindset plays in frontline fundraising, understand your feelings about money & wealth, and how your inner monologue supports or sabotages your outcomes.

Krista, Kristen. (2024) “Mastering your Major Gift Mindset.” CASE District II Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD. February 11-13. https://www.case.org/conferences-training/case-district-ii-annual-conference-2024/sessions/mastering-your-major-gift 

Conference Presentation/Poster: This paper examines the teaching of ecological sustainability in contemporary American business education. We do so through two phases. In Phase 1, we systematically collected data on which of the top undergraduate and graduate US business programs offer a sustainability-related course, identifying 224 courses from 152 unique institutions. In Phase 2, we analyzed 78 syllabi from 48 unique schools we collected from our Phase 1 inquiries. We identify course themes at the individual, organization, and systemic levels. We develop a typology of six types of course designs that incorporate to varying degrees natural and social science concepts, and adopt a general business or a narrow functional perspective. Lastly, we find that faculty themselves demonstrate interdisciplinarity in their formal education. We conclude by surmising about whether Sustainability in Management Education is experiencing a coalescence in the field towards the creation of a discipline in its own right.

Kurland, N.B. & Melkamu, E. (2024) “A Typology of Courses in Sustainability in Management Education: Do we see a coalescing and an emergent discipline?” Presentation at the 2024 Academy of Management meetings, Chicago. August 9-13. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2024.82bp 

Article: Madame Montour, the child of a union forged by an Algonquin woman and French settler, leveraged her fluency in multiple indigenous and European languages to emerge as one of the most prominent interpreters in colonial New York and Pennsylvania. As the fur trade developed and new material culture was introduced in colonial North America, the labor of intercultural interpreters was invaluable as the interactions of diverse peoples, both settler and indigenous, intensified. This paper examines the distinguished career of Madame Montour as an interpreter engaged in intercultural diplomacy during an increasingly tumultuous and violent time that was marked by shifts in the relationship between gender and labor identity. I consider how payments in the form of cash, cloth, and clothing were entwined in the negotiation of an emerging colonial identity and how Madame Montour advocated to be recognized for her labor and to receive timely compensation for her skilled work. 

Levine, Mary Ann. (2024) “Labor, gender, and intercultural diplomacy: the emergence of Madame Montour as a professional interpreter in colonial North America. World Archaeology 55(1):107-120. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2024.2375228 

Article: The consequences of electron transfer (ET) in ruthenium-arene catalysts supported by triarylphosphine ligands have not been fully elucidated in coordinating solvents, which are known to engender further transformations in analogous Ru species upon oxidation and may reveal new modes of reactivity in these compounds. Herein, we report electrochemical studies of (p-cymene)RuCl2(PArX3) complexes containing substituted triarylphosphines (PArX3) and the effects of the ligand substituents on ET processes. These complexes undergo ET at potentials that depend on the ligand substituents (X); in CH3CN, electrochemical oxidation generates new products whose formation and ET behavior also depend on these substituents. Based on evidence for loss of cymene in these transformations, the products of these reactions are formulated as the tris(nitrile) complexes (PArX3)RuCl2(NCCH3)3.

Anthony N. Micci, Julia E. Fumo, Robert D. Pike, and Davide Lionetti. (2024) “Effects of Substituted Triarylphosphine Ligands on Electron Transfer in [(p-cymene)Ru] Complexes.” Organometallics 43, 1912. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.organomet.4c00267 🔓 

Articles: 

Maksymowicz, Virginia and Blaise Tobia. (2024) "The Venice Biennale and beyond, to Parma, Verona, Rome and Sardinia." Artblog June 12, 2024. https://www.theartblog.org/2024/06/the-venice-biennale-and-beyond-in-parma-verona-rome-and-sardinia

Maksymowicz, Virginia, Blaise Tobia. (2024) "CETA: Connecting Artists and Communities."  Living New Deal: The Fireside October. https://livingnewdeal.org/newsletters/october-2024

Maksymowicz, Virginia, Blaise Tobia, and Roberta Fallon. (2024) "Artomatic Art Fair, for artists, by artists, 25 years strong, in Washington, D.C." Artblog March 28. https://www.theartblog.org/2024/03/artomatic-art-fair-for-artists-by-artists-25-years-strong-in-washington-d-c/

Maksymowicz, Virginia, Blaise Tobia, and Roberta Fallon. (2024) "Three different art experiences in Washington, D.C., at the National Gallery, American University and Glenstone." Artblog, December 9. https://www.theartblog.org/2024/12/three-different-art-experiences-in-washington-d-c-at-the-national-gallery-american-university-and-glenstone/

Conference Presentation/Poster: 

Maksymowicz, Virginia. (2024) Zoom presentation: "The Lightness of Bearing." The International Sculpture Center membership ARTslam session. Tuesday, June 25.

This webinar, aimed at historians, art historians, and university students, examines the connections between government funding of the arts under the New Deal of the 1930s and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act of the 1970s.

Maksymowicz, Virginia, Mary Okin, Blaise Tobia. (2024) Three-session webinar for The Living New Deal, "CETA: Forgotten Federally Funded Artists," October 3, 10, 17. Recordings of sessions archived on LND website and YouTube Channel. https://livingnewdeal.org/lnd-events/webinars

Creative Works: 

Maksymowicz, Virginia. (2024) "Pushing Buttons," group exhibition, Montgomery County Community College Art Gallery, Blue Bell, PA, August 28 - October 7.

Maksymowicz, Virginia. (2024) "Perennial Visions VI," group exhibition, DaVinci Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PA, December 5 - 22.

Maksymowicz, Virginia. (2024) Sculptural commission, "Epiphany," for The Clio Project collection. 

Article: The astonishingly rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) raises fundamental questions about human- generated narratives that express personal experiences. First-person narratives that emerge from autobiographical memory are shared frequently as a fundamental form of human activity and play a central role in maintaining relationships, guiding future behavior, and maintaining self-continuity. We generated first-person narratives using prompts with Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer and tested whether human participants could discriminate AI-generated from human-generated first-person narratives. Participants (N = 101) from Prolific rated five randomly selected narratives as human- or AI-generated and explained their choices. Participants were more accurate than chance (65%) and were more accurate rating human-generated than AI-generated narratives. When participants cited grammar and writing to explain their decisions, they were highly accurate, but when citing emotional expression, they performed at chance levels. Initial results suggest that comparing human- to AI-generated narratives provides insight into how personal narratives might express qualities of an identifiably human self.

Grysman, A., Mansfield, C. D., Singer, J. A., Camia, C., Booker, J. A., Bauer, J. J., & Fivush, R. (2024)Human or artificial intelligence: Can people tell the difference in first-person narratives?” Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000187 

Conference Presentation/Poster: In a recently published article “Attention as Practice” we argue that the current critiques of the attention economy are too narrow. We plea for a broader and more systemic concept of attention to propose changes to the attention economy. As a next step, we want to use “Western” and Buddhist approaches to analyze and discuss with you what this broader systemic concept of attention could look like.

McMahan, David. (2024) "Meditation and the Attention Economy." Conference presentation at Toward a systemic concept of attention for the attention economy, using Buddhist and Western ethics. Hybrid (Eindhoven University of Technology and online) February 5-7. https://ephil.ai/event/workshop-attention-buddhist-western-ethics/

Conference Presentation/Poster: Meditation is often described in terms of internal mental states that presumably arise in anyone who practices them diligently, whether they are an ancient monk or a contemporary professional. Scientific models of mindfulness and meditation often attempt to isolate the specific practice from other factors and, ideally, from all surrounding cultural context in order to see how meditation in and of itself “works.”  Some investigators believe that the states meditation produces can be tracked on brain-scanning machines that could, in theory, take the guesswork out of meditation’s effects.  But meditative practices are inevitably embedded in a context of ideas, ideals, cultural sensibilities, and taken-for-granted assumptions.  Much of the work these practices do, therefore, may be quite different in divergent contexts.  

This talk analyzes the role of culture in meditation and theorizes contemplative practices as methods of cultivating ways of being in particular cultural contexts that include repertoires of concepts, attitudes, social practices, ethical dispositions, institutions, available identities, and conceptions of the cosmos.  Taking greater account of the way meditative practices interface with these cultural contexts is essential to understanding their potential benefits and problems.  

McMahan, David. (2024) "Meditation, Culture, and Enlightenment Machines." Invited talk, Brown University, online. March 22. https://courses.cheetahhouse.org/courses/meditation-culture-mcmahan

Op-Ed: Few newspapers in the U.S. covered in depth the passing of Alberto Fujimori — President of Peru from 1990-2000 — on Sept. 11. The story got buried beneath an avalanche of headlines: a presidential debate followed by Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, the commemoration of the tragic events at the World Trade Center, another assassination scare, and a devastating hurricane. Yet, Americans need to know about Fujimori and his career, because they help explain why the U.S. is suffering from a polarized and populist moment today and what the consequences might be.

McNulty, Stephanie. (2024) “Americans Need to Know the Name of Alberto Fujimori.” Time Magazine. October 10. https://time.com/7027079/history-alberto-fujimori/ 🔓 

Conference Presentation/Poster:

McRee, Ben. (2024) Conference Paper: "A Mid-Tudor List: Disruptive Signs of Status in Marian Norwich." Presented November 16  at the North American Conference on British Studies meeting in Denver Colorado. 

Article: The physical properties of rocks on planetary surfaces influence their bulk thermal conductivity (k) and thermal inertia (TI); however, there has been little work done to date to explore quantitative relationships between physical properties (bulk density, porosity, mechanical strength) and thermal properties (k and TI) at Mars-relevant pressures. We present the first k and TI measurements of a comprehensive suite of Mars-relevant igneous and sedimentary rocks under Mars atmospheric pressures.

Ahern, A.A.,  A.D. Rogers, R.J. Macke, S.A. Mertzman, K.R. Mertzman, B.J. Thomson, R.E. Kronyak, G.M. Peters, E.L. Carey, R.J. Hopkins. (2024) “Rock thermal conductivity and thermal inertia measurements under martian atmospheric pressures.” Icarus 424: 116272.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2024.116272

Article: The Iris mission is a student-led 3-U CubeSat comprised of a science payload of 20 geological samples placed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) to study the effects of space weathering (i.e., those aspects that can be investigated in LEO). This experiment is the first of its kind to take place in the vacuum of space. The science objective of the mission is to investigate how space weathering processes affect the surfaces of airless planetary bodies by monitoring the spectral reflectance properties of geological samples over time.

S.A. Connell, D.M. Applin, N.N. Turenne, E.A. Cloutis, C. Kiddell, S. Sidhu, P. Mann, P. Ferguson, M. Driedger, J. Campos, A. Barari, M. May, V. Reddy, S.A. Mertzman, D. Trang. (2024) "The Iris CubeSat mission: Science payload description for a pathfinder geological space weathering investigation.” Acta Astronautica 216, March: 381-394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2024.01.009

Conference Presentation/Poster: Introductory remarks on the screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey; or, Communique #7 from the Institute of the Mechanical Surround (11.13.24): As co-director of the Institute of the Mechanical Surround, I am excited to be here with you tonight and to introduce Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. And I am grateful to Jeremy Moss for inviting me to say a few words before we press play. I have much to say, too much, really. I will start by stating the obvious: We are living through a long season of algorithmic enthusiasm. And although our excitement may tend toward the solitary pleasures of the screen, we are infused with the spirit of revival. We effervesce and we orient ourselves not to each other but through a collective capitulation to our devices. We are willing subjects, performing and playing out the roles that we have assigned ourselves in this drama that is both sacred and secular.

Modern, John. (2024) Introductory remarks, “What the Hell is that Supposed to Mean, HAL?.” Screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Winter Visual Arts Center. Lancaster, PA (November). https://www.johnmodern.com/2024/11/14/what-the-hell-is-that-supposed-to-mean-hal/

Conference Presentation/Poster:

Modern, John. (2024) Panelist. “Toward an Embodied Cognitive Science of Religion: A Roundtable Discussion.” Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. San Diego, CA (November). 

Chapter: There’s religion in my marketing! There’s marketing in my religion! Selling the Sacred explores the religio-cultural and media implications of a two-sided phenomenon: marketing religion as a product and marketing products as religion. What do various forms of religion/marketing collaboration look like in the twenty-first century, and what does this tell us about American culture and society?

Modern, John. (2024) “Rex Humbard, Psychographics, and the Hard Sell.” Selling the Sacred: Religion and Marketing from Crossfit to QAnon, eds. Mara Einstein and Sarah McFarland Taylor, Routledge: 53-66. https://www.routledge.com/Selling-the-Sacred-Religion-and-Marketing-from-Crossfit-to-QAnon/Einstein-Taylor/p/book/9781032378411 

Creative Works:

Montemarano, Nicholas. (2024) “Sonnet Beginning with Job and Ending with Dickinson.” Meridian 48: 15. https://www.readmeridian.org/webview.php?id=2

Montemarano, Nicholas. (2024) “My Mother Speaks to Me from the Afterlife.” Sojourners July: 46. https://sojo.net/magazine/july-2024/culture/my-mother-speaks-me-afterlife

Montemarano, Nicholas. (2024) “No Touch Policy.” Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters 33: 29-30.

Montemarano, Nicholas. (2024) “A Neighborly Day in This Beautywood.” Copper Nickel 39: 6.

Montemarano, Nicholas. (2024) “Bug-out Bag.” Palette Poetry Online December 9. https://www.palettepoetry.com/2024/12/09/bug-out-bag/  🔓 

Montemarano, Nicholas. (2024) “Second Coming.” Rattle online. https://www.rattle.com/second-coming-by-nicholas-montemarano/

Article: This review seeks to summarize the current state-of-knowledge about proxies for reconstructing Cenozoic marine oxygen: sedimentary features, sedimentary redox-sensitive trace elements and isotopes, biomarkers, nitrogen isotopes, foraminiferal trace elements, foraminifera assemblages, foraminifera morphometrics, and benthic foraminifera carbon isotope gradients. Taking stock of each proxy reveals some common limitations in that the majority of proxies function best at low-oxygen concentrations and many reflect multiple environmental drivers. We also highlight recent breakthroughs in geochemistry and proxy approaches for constraining pelagic (in addition to benthic) oxygenation that are rapidly advancing the field.

Hoogakker, Babette, Catherine Davis, Yi Wang, Stepanie Kusch, Katrina Nilsson-Kerr, Dalton Hardisty, Allison Jacobel, Dharma Reyes Macaya, Nicolaas Glock, Sha Ni, Julio Sepúlveda, Abby Ren, Alexandra Auderset, Anya Hess, Katrina Meissner, Jorge Cardich, Robert Anderson, Christine Barras, Chandranath Basak, Harold Bradbury, Inda Brinkmann, Alexis Castillo, Madelyn Cook, Kassandra Costa, Constance Choquel, Paula Diz, Jonas Donnenfield, Felix Elling, Zeynep Erdem, Helena Filipsson, Sebastian Garrido, Julia Gottschalk, Anjaly Govindankutty Menon, Jeroen Groeneveld, Christian Hallman, Ingrid Hendy, Rick Hennekam, Wanyi Lu, Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, Lelia Matos, Alfredo Martínez-García, Giulia Molina, Práxedes Muñoz, Simone Moretti, Jennifer Morford, Sophie Nuber, Svetlana Radionovskaya, Morgan Raven, Christopher Somes, Anja Studer, Kazuyo Tachikawa, Raúl Tapia, Martin Tetard, Tyler Vollmer, Shuzhuang Wu, Yan Zhang, Xin-Yuan Zheng, and Yuxin Zhou. (2024) “Reviews and syntheses: Review of proxies for low-oxygen paleoceanographic reconstructions.” EGUsphere [preprint] https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-2981 🔓 

Article: This article compares the results of a pair of course material surveys for faculty and students conducted before and after the COVID-19 pandemic by academic librarians at a private liberal arts college in the northeastern U.S. Findings indicate that overall students are spending significantly less per semester on required course materials, but some are going without significantly more required materials due to cost. Furthermore, first-year students were not found to be spending any less than prior to the pandemic and, as a result, spent significantly more in 2023 than most of their more experienced peers. The decrease in average student spending corresponds with our findings that faculty became more cost conscious and expanded efforts to make required materials affordable by assigning more OER and fewer materials which they consider to be overpriced or unaffordable. As a result of these and other strategies, by 2023 significantly more faculty had been able to develop courses for which the required materials cost nothing for students. The authors discuss the importance of these and additional findings, placing them in the context of similar surveys and suggesting ways that the data can be used to inform current library practices and future research.

Barnes, C. A., Vine, S., & Nadeau, R. (2024) “Assessing textbook affordability before and after the COVID-19 pandemic: Results of student and faculty surveys.” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 50(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102864 

Conference Presentation/Poster: This poster shared the College Library's investigations into the habits of and impact on F&M students purchasing required course materials, oftentimes an unexpectedly high and hidden cost of higher education, particularly for first-semester first-year students. At F&M, first- year students reported spending nearly 25% more on required materials than any other cohort. To save money, students reported forgoing purchasing required materials, risking damaging academic consequences. Library staff investigated this further by studying course syllabi to determine how students are most commonly being directed to acquire materials and collect data to support informed decision making at F&M when addressing course material affordability.

Nadeau, Ryan M. (2024) “#Textbook Broke: From Student Cost Surprises to Student Success.” Poster presentation at the 2024 AAC&U Diversity, Equity, and Student Success Conference, Philadelphia, PA, March 21, 2024. Contributors include: Lisa Stillwell, Jenn Buch, Diana Daigle, Scott Vine. 

Article: Household solid fuel use has adverse impacts on health and the environment. The Indian government's Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (PMUY) subsidy promoted the adoption of Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) by millions of Indian households. There is little knowledge, however, regarding decision-making to reduce solid fuel use after adopting cleaner fuels. Leveraging panel data on household energy use in rural India we jointly estimated LPG adoption and consumption to study the reduction in solid fuel use. Our results indicate that exclusive LPG use increased from 4.5% to 17.8% between 2015 and 2018 while fuel stacking (use of multiple fuels) doubled from 18% to 39%. The household's wealth index, self-reported higher social strata, business ownership, head of household's educational level, and the proportion of LPG-using households in the village were positively associated with LPG consumption and suspension of solid fuels. Distance to LPG refill delivery, household size and PMUY subsidy were negatively associated with LPG share though LPG share was positively associated with the interaction of PMUY with wealth index. Policy efforts should target sustained LPG consumption by making refill delivery more accessible and implementing a pro-poor refill subsidy as well as general poverty alleviation (e.g., by creating income generation opportunities).

Dawit Guta, Hisham Zerriffi, Jill Baumgartner, Abhishek Jain, Sunil Mani, Darby Jack, Ellison Carter, Guofeng Shen, Jennifer Orgill-Meyer, Joshua Rosenthal, Katherine Dickinson, Rob Bailis, Yuta Masuda. (2024) “Moving Beyond Clean Cooking Energy adoption: Using Indian ACCESS panel data to understand solid fuel suspension.” Energy Policy 184: 113908. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2023.113908.

Article: The Indian government promoted the adoption of LPG by millions of poor households through targeted Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana connection subsidies. However, there is no empirical study on the impact of LPG adoption and usage on cooking energy efficiency. It is important to analyze the causal impact of LPG usage on cooking energy efficiency to help estimate the energy saving resulting from fuel-switching and understand the implications for the improvement of the environment, health, and socioeconomic outcomes. This paper leverages panel data on rural household energy use from the Access to Clean Cooking Energy and Electricity – Survey of States survey to evaluate the impact of the share of LPG consumption on overall cooking energy efficiency in 5,590 [n = 1,538 in 2015 and n = 4,052 in 2018] LPG adopters. To account for the potential endogeneity posed by the share of LPG consumption on our dependent variable, we used the village-level fraction of households who report the use of LPG as the main source of cooking fuel as an instrumental variable. We find a statistically significant impact of LPG consumption share on improved household cooking energy efficiency. A 10 % increase in the share of LPG reduces the total useful energy consumed by 9 % and the final energy consumed by 23 %. The extrapolated result indicates that the shift by all partial LPG user households in rural India in 2018 to exclusive (100 %) use of LPG will save about 81 million tonnes of firewood or 3.34 % of India’s primary energy consumption. A pro-poor subsidies for LPG refill and other policy measures that encourage households to shift to more exclusive use of LPG can reduce overall household energy consumption which is expected in turn to help achieve the environmental and health benefits of improved energy efficiency.

Dawit Guta, Hisham Zerriffi, Jill Baumgartner, Abhishek Jain, Sunil Mani, Darby Jack, Ellison Carter, Guofeng Shen, Jennifer Orgill-Meyer, Joshua Rosenthal, Katherine Dickinson, Rob Bailis, Yuta J. Masuda. (2024) “The impact of LPG consumption on cooking energy efficiency: Evidence from rural Indian household panel data.” World Development Perspectives 36: 100627. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100627

Article: 

Krishnapriya, P.P., Marc Jeuland, Jennifer Orgill-Meyer, Subhrendu K. Pattanayak. (2024) “Gendered demand for environmental health technologies: Evidence of complementarities from stove auctions in India.” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 113:102295. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2024.102295 

Book: In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony.

Pearson Edward. (2024) The Enslaved and Their Enslavers: Power, Resistance, and Culture in South Carolina, 1670-1825. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.pennpress.org/9781512824384/the-enslaved-and-their-enslavers/ 

Article: The photophysical properties of the β-barrel superfolder green fluorescent protein (sfGFP) arise from the chromophore that forms post-translationally in the interior of the protein. Specifically, the protonation state of the side chain of tyrosine 66 in the chromophore, in addition to the network of hydrogen bonds between the chromophore and surrounding residues, is directly related to the electronic absorbance and emission properties of the protein. The pH dependence of the photophysical properties of this protein were modulated by the genetic, site-specific incorporation of 3-nitro-L-tyrosine (mNO2Y) at site 66 in sfGFP. The altered photophysical properties of this noncanonical amino acid (ncAA) sfGFP construct were assessed by absorbance and fluorescence spectroscopies. Notably, a comparison of the pKa of the 3-nitrophenol side chain of mNO2Y incorporated in the protein relative to the phenol side chain of the tyrosine at site 66 in the native chromophore as well as the pKa of the 3-nitrophenol side chain of the free ncAA were measured and are compared. A structural analysis of the ncAA containing sfGFP construct is presented to yield molecular insight into the origin of the altered absorbance and fluorescence properties of the protein.

Broughton, D.P., Holod, C.G., Camilo-Contreras, A., Harris, D.R., Brewer, S.H., and Phillips-Piro, C.M. (2024) “Modulating the pH Dependent Photophysical Properties of Green Fluorescent Protein.” RSC Advances 14: 32284-32291. https://doi.org/10.1039/D4RA05058D  🔓 

Article: We invented a new way to change nanoparticles into more complicated forms. We turned copper sulfide nanorods into mixed copper sulfide/selenide nanorods. We also changed shapes into bricks or diamonds with copper sulfide and copper selenide in different areas. In attempting to understand why the particles changed in different ways, we uncovered new chemicals being created at different temperatures. This gives new insights into the rational design of nanomaterials. It also creates new nanoheterostructures for potential use in sustainable energy applications like thermoelectrics.

Hole, B.; Luo, Q.; Garcia, R.; Xie, W.; Rudman, E.; Nguyen, C. L. T.; Dhakal, D.; Young, H. L.; Thompson, K. L.; Butterfield, A. G.; Schaak, R. E.; Plass, K. E. (2023) “Temperature-Dependent Selection of Reaction Pathways, Reactive Species, and Products during Postsynthetic Selenization of Copper Sulfide Nanoparticles.” Chemistry of Materials 35 (21): 9073–9085. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.3c01772 🔓 

Article: Undergraduate research transforms student’s conceptions of themselves as scientists and encourages participation and retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Many barriers exist to carrying out scientifically impactful undergraduate research in nanomaterials at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs). Here, we share several practices and design principles that demonstrate pathways to overcome these barriers. Design of modular research projects with low entry barriers is essential. Postsynthetic transformation of nanoparticles is a field that enables such design and has been used successfully to advance nanoscience research while being achievable within undergraduate laboratories. Relatively large, inclusive research communities can be supported through the creation of opportunities with peer- and near-peer mentoring. We also share emerging strategies for enabling routine undergraduate access to transmission electron microscopy, which is one of the most mainstream characterization techniques in nanoscience yet is frequently absent from the infrastructure at undergraduate-focused institutions.

Plass, K. E.; Krebs, J. K.; Morford, J. L.; Schaak, R. E.; Stapleton, J. J.; van Duin, A. C. T. (2024) “Nanomaterials Research at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution: Transforming Nanorods, Undergraduate Research Communities, and Infrastructure.” ACS Nanoscience. Au 4 (4), 223–234. https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnanoscienceau.4c00005 🔓 

Article: Tetrahedrite (Cu12Sb4S13) is an earth-abundant and nontoxic compound with prospective applications in green energy technologies such as thermoelectric waste heat recycling or photovoltaic power generation. A facile, one-pot solution-phase modified polyol method has been developed that produces high-purity nanoscale tetrahedrite products with exceptional stoichiometric and phase control. This modified polyol method is used here to produce phase-pure quaternary and quintenary tetrahedrite nanoparticles doped on the Cu-site with Zn, Fe, Ni, Mn, or Co. This is the first time that Cu-site codoped quintenary tetrahedrite and Mn-doped quaternary tetrahedrite have been produced by a solution-phase method. X-ray diffraction shows phase-pure tetrahedrite, while scanning and transmission electron microscopy show the size and morphology of the nanomaterials. Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy confirms nanoparticles have near-stoichiometric elemental compositions. Thermal stability of quintenary codoped tetrahedrite material is analyzed using thermogravimetric analysis, finding that codoping with Mn, Fe, Ni, and Zn increased thermal stability while codoping with cobalt decreased thermal stability. This is the first systematic study of the optical properties of quaternary and quintenary tetrahedrite nanoparticles doped on the Cu-site. Visible–NIR diffuse reflectance spectroscopy reveals that the quaternary and quintenary tetrahedrite nanoparticles have direct optical band gaps ranging from 1.88 to 2.04 eV. Data from thermal and optical characterization support that codoped tetrahedrite nanoparticles are composed of quintenary grains. This research seeks to enhance understanding of the material properties of tetrahedrite, leading to the optimization of sustainable, nontoxic, and high-performance photovoltaic and thermoelectric materials.

Daniel, J. E.; Jesby, C. M.; Plass, K. E.; Anderson, M. E. (2024) “Multinary Tetrahedrite (Cu12–x–yMxNySb4S13) Nanoparticles: Tailoring Thermal and Optical Properties with Copper-Site Dopants.” Chemistry of Materials 36 (7): 3246–3258. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.3c03110  🔓 

Conference Presentation/Poster: We invited stakeholders involved in dark tourism to comment on, and respond to academic constructs of dark tourism, which resides within the body of literature on this topic. Specifically, we undertook a genre analysis of dark tourism literature, and discussed our findings with an internationally diverse sample of dark tourism providers using interviews. The findings suggest that the putative dark tourism sector rejects the label dark tourism and prefers alternative signifiers including memorial tourism/heritage with a focus on life, living, remembrance and peace. Dark tourism thus remains a quintessentially academic discourse that merits scrutiny, and input from the sector that it focuses on, and so further decolonising research should be carried out to co-create new conceptual ideation around dark tourism.   

Wight, C., Podoshen, J.S., and Lennon, J. (2024) “Dark tourism: Sectoral Engagement and Ontological Repositioning.” Presented at Society for Marketing Advances (SMA) Annual Conference, Tampa, Florida. November 6-9. 

Conference Presentation/Poster: 

Pritchett, Joseph. (2024).”The Mindful Pilgrim: Mindfulness as a Framework for Exploring Pilgrimage.” Conference presentation at Institute for Pilgrimage Studies Symposium, “Comparing Pilgrimage: Layers of Meaning and Motion” at William & Mary College, Williamsburg, VA. November 8-9, 2024.  https://www.wm.edu/sites/pilgrimage/events/ 

Article: On the complexities of campus sexual assault data.

Rondini, Ashley C. (2024) “Complicating Clery.” Contexts: Sociology for the Public 23(4): 68-72. https://doi.org/10.1177/15365042241293441 

Chapter: The Agenda for Social Justice 3: Solutions for 2024 provides accessible insights into some of the most pressing social problems and proposes public policy responses to those problems. Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), the book offers recommendations for action by elected officials, policymakers and the public regarding key issues for social justice. Chapters include discussion of social problems related to criminal justice, the economy, food insecurity, education, healthcare, housing and immigration.

Rondini, Ashley C. (2024) “Gender-Affirming Healthcare for Transgender and Gender Minority Youth.” In K. Budd, H. Dillaway, M. Nair, and J. Smith (Eds.) Agenda for Social Justice: Solutions for 2024. Bristol: Policy Press: 106-155. https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/agenda-for-social-justice-3 

Article: This article uses tensions over the construction of a flow-regulation infrastructure built to control outflow from Lake Titicaca into the Desaguadero River, on the border between Peru and Bolivia, as a case study to explore the ways that relationships to water emerge and are contested. We argue that a nuanced understanding of tensions arising from this infrastructure requires us to recognize the long-term history of how the river accumulated practices, meanings and materials. Adapting the work of Arturo Escobar, we use the concept of ‘water regime’ to think about how engagements with the river are based in different spatiotemporal frameworks that have developed transhistorically and come into tension around the materiality and dynamism of the river itself.

Smith, Scott C. and Maribel Pérez Arias. (2024) “Water Regimes and Infrastructures: A Transhistorical Archaeology of the Desaguadero River, Bolivia.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal First view (Nov 4).  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774324000246 🔓 

Book: This book is a collection of comprehensive background essays coupled with carefully edited Supreme Court case excerpts designed to explore constitutional law and the role of the Supreme Court in its development and interpretation. Grounded in both theory and politics, the book endeavors to heighten readers’ understanding of this critical part of the American political system.

Stephenson, Donald Grier, Jr. (2024) American Constitutional Law: Introductory Essays and Selected Cases. 19th edition, New York: Routledge. 

Conference Presentation/Poster: Symposium abstract: [218] Symposium · 2024 FRYXELL AWARD SYMPOSIUM: PAPERS IN HONOR OF LUIS BARBA (SPONSORED BY FRYXELL COMMITTEE) Luis Barba has received this year's Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research. To honor his long, prolific, and multifaceted career, we welcome research or review papers emphasizing the techniques, culture areas, and archaeological sites in which he has worked, including archaeological science studies in Mexican archaeology and Teotihuacan in particular, field geophysics, field geochemistry, and chemical residue analysis.

Sternberg, Rob and Alessandra Pecci. (2024) “Luis Barba: 2024 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research Honoree.” Presented at The 89th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. New Orleans, April 17-21. Summary: https://core.tdar.org/document/498411/luis-barba-2024-fryxell-award-for-interdisciplinary-research-honoree

Conference Presentation/Poster: The 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s was swept by the A’s in 4 games. Game 3 was interrupted on Oct. 17, 1989 by the magnitude 7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake along the San Andreas fault, delaying completion of the Series. The death toll was 62, with $6 billion of damage. Here I show Loma Prieta philatelic and ephemera items (not to scale) from my thematic collection on North American earthquakes.

Sternberg, Rob, Isabelle Foster and Kate Cowan.  (2024) "The Loma Prieta 1989 ‘World Series’ Earthquake Jolted Joe Dimaggio." Exhibit presented at the Philatelic Society of Lancaster Open House and Exhibition, November 13. https://lcps-stamps.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024-11-13-Exhibit-Rob-Sternberg-Loma-Prieta.pdf 

Article: This article examines the theological and hermeneutical foundations and fault lines of Muslim modernism and traditionalism in South Asia. It does so through a close reading of a massively consequential but thus far unstudied debate on the normative sources and interpretive parameters of religion in colonial modernity between the scholars Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1877), founders of arguably the most prominent bastions of modernism and traditionalism in Muslim South Asia: the Aligarh Muslim University and the Deoband Madrasa, both established in the late nineteenth century.

Tareen, SherAli. (2024) “The Theological Foundations of Muslim Modernism and Traditionalism in South Asia.” Modern Asian Studies 58, no. 2 (October): 357-385. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X23000471 🔓 

Article: An article on how to teach theory in introductory courses on Islam without replicating the prohibitive tenor of theoretical discourse. 

Tareen, SherAli. (2024) “Teaching Theory without Theory Talk in an Introductory Islam Course.” The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching 5, Issue 1 (March): 62-65. https://serials.atla.com/wabashcenter/issue/view/356/SherAliTareen 🔓 

Article: This article presents the first complete English translation of a major Persian text on Sufi meditation and cosmology: the towering eighteenth century Naqshbandī Indian Sufi master and poet Mirzā Maẓhar Jān-i Jānān's (d. 1781) Sulūk-i Ṭarīqa (The Conduct of the Sufi Path). Composed in 1760, at the centerpiece of this text is the encounter between the realm of divine reality, prophetic authority, and the practice and conduct of the Sufi practitioner, especially in relation to the journey through the subtle spiritual centers or laṭā'if.

Tareen, SherAli. (2024) “The Conduct of the Sufi Path: Naqshbandi Meditation in Early Modern India” Journal of the Institute of Sufi Studies 2, no.2 (January): 251-264. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/3565767 🔓 

Article: The indolizinium natural product ficuseptine, produced by the tropical fig tree Ficus septica, has been reported to have antibacterial properties. Herein, the synthesis of ficuseptine, ten analogues with differing aryl substituents, and two aryl regioisomers is reported. Despite several previous total syntheses, synthetically prepared ficuseptine has not been subjected to biological testing to confirm its activity. In our hands, ficuseptine was moderately active in Gram-positive B. spizizenii, with an MIC of 32 μg/mL, which was maintained for most aryl substituents. The position of the aryl rings was crucial, however, since regioisomeric ficuseptine analogues, mimicking related natural products, were found to be inactive. Finally, all ficuseptine derivatives were inactive (MIC >128 μg/mL) against Gram-negative E. coli. Understanding these structure–activity relationships (SAR) is helpful for future studies to understand the molecule’s mechanism of action or further develop its antibacterial properties.

Hoang, N. L. T.*; Nsereko, N. N. P.*; Sheetz, S. A.*; Tasker, S. Z. (2024) “Synthesis and Antibacterial Activity of Ficuseptine and its Derivatives: Determination of Structure–Activity Relationships.” Synlett December. https://doi.org/10.1055/a-2490-2986 

Article: Modern bivalves display a latitudinal life history gradient (LLHG): tropical bivalves tend to grow fast and die young, whereas mid- and high-latitude bivalves typically grow more slowly and may live much longer. Environmental factors such as temperature and seasonal food availability, both of which affect metabolic rates, are thought to be partially responsible for this pattern. Given that temperature influences life histories, we predict that the expression of individual life history gradients should vary over time with changes in global climate. Here, we use internal growth increments to constrain lifespans and growth rates in populations of Glycymeris americana and Glycymeris subovata along the Pliocene and Pleistocene Atlantic continental shelf of North America. We find that G. americana was long-lived (up to 93 years) and follows the expected pattern of longer life and slower growth at higher latitudes, whereas the shorter-lived (up to 36 years) G. subovata does not. G. americana life history data lend preliminary support for a change in the slope of the LLHG from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene. While G. americana is currently living along the U.S. Atlantic Coast, we were unable to obtain sufficient samples for our analysis; this represents a future area of research.

David K. Moss, Linda C. Ivany, Donna Surge, Stephen Casper, Abby Fancher, and Roger D. K. Thomas. (2024) “Latitudinal life history gradients in two Pliocene species of Glycymeris (Bivalvia).” Historical Biology, 1-14 https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2024.2357608

Conference Presentation/Poster: Glycymeris americana lives today on the continental shelf off the southeastern U.S.A. It appeared first in the early Pliocene. Direct antecedents occur in mid-Miocene and latest Oligocene strata, so the lineage endured for up to 25 Myr. Shells of G. americana are variable in form and adult size, especially on different substrates. During the mid-Piacenzian warm period, variants with striking patterns of aberrant shell sculpture appeared in populations of G. americana. These variants occur together with normal shells in faunas that were contemporaneous, within limits of correlation, from North Carolina to south Florida. They occur in sands and shell beds deposited during a major transgression attributed to a high glacio-eustatic sea level. The aberrant shells bear oblique or irregularly concentric folds or ridges, largely affecting only the outer shell layer. Four distinct variants are recognized: (M1) oblique dorsal rugae, variable in number and amplitude, just posterior or less often anterior of the umbo; (M2) more extensive anterior and posterior rugae, diverging from a medial area of the shell without rugae; (M3) irregularly concentric rugae extending across the entire shell, which is long relative to its height; (M4) irregularly concentric rugae on juvenile shells which are suppressed in adults that revert to the normal shell shape. These variants occur in varying frequencies among populations. No such aberrant shell morphotypes have been found in later Pliocene, Pleistocene or living populations of G. americana. David Nicol cited the occurrence of M1 together with wildtype shells (M0) as evidence of genetic polymorphism in G. americana. Later he described M2 as a distinct species. Discovery of M0, M1 and M3 in the same shell bed led to consideration of a model based on a single mutation with different expressions in homozygotes and heterozygotes, incorporating pleiotropic and ecophenotypic effects, but this did not satisfactorily explain all the variants. Now, recognition of high frequencies at which transposable elements occur among living bivalves; the kinds of disruptive influence they exert on patterns of development, often with repression of their effects; the fact that they proliferate most readily under environmental stress; and that their negative influences commonly cause them to be vulnerable to extinction, suggest that a transposable element was responsible for just such a set of outcomes in these Pliocene populations. This proliferation of aberrant shell forms in G. americana coincides with the occurrence of unusual morphologies in other taxa in the same faunas. Ocean temperatures off the southeastern United States increased sharply at this time and ranges of subtropical taxa extended further north than at any other time in the Neogene. These events appear to have been prompted by changes in ocean circulation, nutrient availability, and other environmental effects arising from late stages of closure of the Isthmus of Panama.

Thomas, Roger D. K. (2024) “A short-lived burst of aberrant polymorphism in Pliocene populations of Glycymeris americana (Bivalvia: Arcoida), consistent with expression of a transposable element in its genome, associated with rapid environmental change in the western Atlantic.” Conference presentation at the 12th North American Paleontological Convention, at the University of Michigan. June 17-21. Part of a series of talks on “A Model System for evolution and environmental changes: The Marine Communities of the Neogene Western Atlantic.” June 17. https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/napc2024/wp-content/uploads/sites/1083/2024/06/NAPC-Program.pdf 

Chapter: Chickies Rock rises abruptly from the east bank of the Susquehanna River at Columbia, Pennsylvania, where it breaks through a ridge held up by massively bedded quartzite. Here in the 1830s, Samuel Haldeman recognized long straight tubes that he later described as Skolithos linearis, penetrating the quartzite. Uncertain about the nature of these cylindrical ‘vermiform or linear’, unbranched ‘stems’, Haldeman first treated them as a subgenus of Fucoides, to which root-like traces were then often assigned. By the time James Hall first illustrated the species in 1847, Haldeman was sure they were burrows of a worm-like animal, as the name he had chosen implied. Since 1960, Donald Wise has developed a detailed analysis of structural deformation of the Chickies Anticline, using the Skolithos burrows as ‘plumb-bobs’ against which Taconic rotation of the rock fabric can bemeasured. Wise showed that later Alleghanian deformation produced prominent folds with external rotation up to twice as great as that of the rock fabric itself. Now conserved as a county park, Chickies Rock attracts many visitors. Its cliff-top is a superb viewpoint from which to contemplate progressive westward migration of the Appalachian drainage divide, ongoing since the late Jurassic opening of the Atlantic Ocean.

Thomas, Roger D. K and Elizabeth Driscoll. (2024) “Chickies Rock, a striking promontory on the Susquehanna River: the early Cambrian type locality of the trace fossil Skolithos and a model site for structural analysis.” In: Clary, R. M., Pyle, F. J. and Andrews, W. M. (eds), Geology's Significant Sites and their Contributions to Geoheritage, p.149-163. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, v. 543. https://doi.org/10.1144/SP543-2022-295 🔓 

Conference Presentation/Poster: This paper explores how US Black culture and people interact with contemporary Asian cosmopolitanism, ultimately proposing a new lens to theorize “Afro Asia.” “Afro Asia” is a political paradigm that typically points to the mid-20th century as a radical utopian moment of Black and Asian solidarity. This paper reconsiders these terms of Afro Asia by observing how contemporary Asian and US Black culture and people are bound by broader cultural ideas, affinities, and aspirations. Specifically, Villegas explores the universe of Black geek culture. Using the bassist/vocalist Thundercat, the rapper RZA, and Black geek conventions as examples, he demonstrates the role of Black Orientalism and Japanese anime in the world building of Black geek communities and new Afro Asian imaginaries.

Villegas, Mark. (2024) "Planet Asia: Pop Culture, Fandom, and Migration in New Afro-Asian Politics." The 5th Kyoto Conference on Arts, Media & Culture, October 15–19. Kyoto Research Park, Kyoto, Japan. https://kyoto-amc.iafor.org/kamc2024/

Article: Normal aging leads to myelin alterations in the rhesus monkey dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), which are positively correlated with degree of cognitive impairment. It is hypothesized that remyelination with shorter and thinner myelin sheaths partially compensates for myelin degradation, but computational modeling has not yet explored these two phenomena together systematically. Here, we used a two-pronged modeling approach to determine how age-related myelin changes affect a core cognitive function: spatial working memory. First, we built a multicompartment pyramidal neuron model fit to monkey dlPFC empirical data, with an axon including myelinated segments having paranodes, juxtaparanodes, internodes, and tight junctions. This model was used to quantify conduction velocity (CV) changes and action potential (AP) failures after demyelination and subsequent remyelination. Next, we incorporated the single neuron results into a spiking neural network model of working memory. While complete remyelination nearly recovered axonal transmission and network function to unperturbed levels, our models predict that biologically plausible levels of myelin dystrophy, if uncompensated by other factors, can account for substantial working memory impairment with aging. The present computational study unites empirical data from ultrastructure up to behavior during normal aging, and has broader implications for many demyelinating conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia.

Assessment provided by eLife:  This manuscript reports a valuable computational study of the effects of axon de-myelination and re-myelination on action potential speed and propagation failure. The manuscript presents solid evidence for the effects of de- and re-myelination in different models of working memory, with potential implications in disorders such as multiple sclerosis. The exposition of the manuscript is targeted for researchers interested in biophysical models of cognitive deficits.

Ibañez, Sara, Nilapratim Sengupta, Jennifer I Luebke, Klaus Wimmer, Christina M Weaver. (2024) “Myelin dystrophy impairs signal transmission and working memory in a multiscale model of the aging prefrontal cortex.”  eLife 12:RP90964 https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.90964.3 🔓 

Article: Abstract:  In this novel large-scale multiplexed immunofluorescence study we comprehensively characterized and compared layer-specific proteomic features within regions of interest of the widely divergent dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (A46) and primary visual cortex (A17) of adult rhesus monkeys. Twenty-eight markers were imaged in rounds of sequential staining, and their spatial distribution precisely quantified within gray matter layers and superficial white matter. Cells were classified as neurons, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, microglia, or endothelial cells. The distribution of fibers and blood vessels were assessed by quantification of staining intensity across regions of interest. This method revealed multivariate similarities and differences between layers and areas. Protein expression in neurons was the strongest determinant of both laminar and regional differences, whereas protein expression in glia was more important for intra-areal laminar distinctions. Among specific results, we observed a lower glia-to-neuron ratio in A17 than in A46 and the pan-neuronal markers HuD and NeuN were differentially distributed in both brain areas with a lower intensity of NeuN in layers 4 and 5 of A17 compared to A46 and other A17 layers. Astrocytes and oligodendrocytes exhibited distinct marker-specific laminar distributions that differed between regions; notably, there was a high proportion of ALDH1L1-expressing astrocytes and of oligodendrocyte markers in layer 4 of A17. The many nuanced differences in protein expression between layers and regions observed here highlight the need for direct assessment of proteins, in addition to RNA expression, and set the stage for future protein-focused studies of these and other brain regions in normal and pathological conditions.

Castro-Mendoza P.B., Weaver C.M., Chang W., Medalla M., Rockland K., Lowery L., Varghese M., Hof P.R., Meyer D., Luebke J.I.. (2024) “Proteomic features of gray matter layers and superficial white matter of the rhesus monkey neocortex: comparison of prefrontal area 46 and occipital area 17.” Brain Structure and Function 229:1495–1525. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-024-02819-y 🔓