Wheaton News

Francisco Fernández de Alba, associate professor of Hispanic studies, presented the keynote address “1980s Madrid: The War on Drugs and the Transatlantic Conspiracy Theory” at the Levy-Wasteneys Graduate Symposium sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Toronto (Canada) in March. He also presented “Of Bubbles and Islands: In Between Peripherality and the Iberian Atlantic” at the Centro de Estudios Canarias-América conference at Hunter College in New York in April.

Vicki Bartolini, professor of education, co-wrote the article “A Shift to Inquiry: The Heart of Effective Teaching and Professional Development for the 21st Century” in the New Educator (February). She also collaborated with Blakely Fetridge Bundy ’66 on the steering committee of TRUCE (Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment) to publish seasonal screen-free play plans for families and teachers of young children.

Alexander Bloom, professor of history, presented the paper “Whatever Happened to the New York Intellectuals?” at Alfred Kazin: A Centennial Celebration, a conference at Wellesley College in May. He also presented the talks “‘Long Time Gone’: The Shifting Meanings of the 1960s Over the Last 50 Years” and “Making the Past Talk: Deriving Textured Meaning From Inanimate Documents?” to graduate students at the University of Rome in June.

Samuel Coale, professor of English, published the article “Mapping the Manse and Resuscitating Rome: Hawthorne’s Themed Spaces and Staging Places” in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. He also presented the following talks: “The Big Read: A morning workshop for public school teachers on Edgar Allan Poe” and “Poe: Gothic Visions and Fiendish Formulas” at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass., in February; “Innocence Abroad: Everything but the Pants” at the Redwood Library in Newport, R.I., in March; “Hawthorne and Melville: Dark Souls and Ambiguous Visions” at the Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Mass., in March; “Brook Farm, Blithedale, and Hawthorne’s Veils” at the Theodore Parker Church Unitarian Universalist in West Roxbury, Mass., in April; “Literature as Experience: Hawthorne and DeLillo” at Our Sisters’ School in New Bedford, Mass., in April; and “Hawthorne in the Berkshires: The World Must Be Made to Mean” at the Hawthorne conference in North Adams, Mass., in June.

Michael Drout, professor of English, wrote the chapters “Teaching Beowulf Aloud” in Teaching Beowulf in the Twenty-First Century (Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, April 2014) and “The Council of Elrond, All Those Poems, and the Famous F-ing Elves: Strategies for Teaching the Hard Parts of Tolkien” in Approaches to Teaching J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Other Works (Modern Language Association, June 2014).

Matthew Evans, associate professor of chemistry and geology, co-wrote the article “Tropical Pacific Influence on Source and Transport of Marine Aerosols to West Antarctica” in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate (February).

William Kole, visiting instructor of English, published the article “#26Tweets2Boston” for the Associated Press, which was highlighted in Business Insider magazine and on the national media site Poynter.org. While running the Boston Marathon in April, Kole tweeted his thoughts and observations.

Lisa Lebduska, associate professor of English, published the article “Racist Visual Rhetoric and Images of Trayvon Martin” in Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society (May).

Mark LeBlanc, professor of computer science, and the Lexomics Research Group won third place in the Student Research Competition in April. Presented by the Northeast Region of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, the award recognizes the team’s efforts in the new design and implementation of the group’s online tool to help scholars mine digital corpora. The team included Devin Delfino ’14, Bryan Jensen ’15, Mengyang Li ’14, Julia Morneau ’16, Richard Neal ’14 and LeBlanc. Their poster presentation and the abstract, “Lexos: A Text Mining Workflow,” were also published in the proceedings of the consortium.

Kim Miller, associate professor of women’s and gender studies and art history, presented the talk “Memory and Mourning in the Digital World and ‘The Space Outside’: Locating Feminist Political Voices in South Africa’s Memorial Landscape” at Hamilton College in May. She also organized a workshop for faculty and students on “Digital Feminisms at Work in the Classroom.”

Gail Sahar, professor of psychology and associate provost, co-wrote the article “The Effects of Attributions for Crime on Attitudes Toward Prison Reform” in Applied Psychology in Criminal Justice (May). Megan O’Toole ’13 was co-author of the article. Sahar also wrote the article “On the Importance of Attribution Theory in Political Psychology” in the journal Social and Personality Psychology Compass.

A. Javier Treviño, Jane Oxford Keiter Professor of Sociology, and Karen McCormack, associate professor of sociology, co-edited Service Sociology and Academic Engagement in Social Problems (Ashgate Publishing, 2014). Treviño also taught a graduate course on social systems theory at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, in May.