Stateside SBC Folks Busy This Summer

From staff reports

How’s that for hands-on experience? As part of her research on practical approaches to developing sustainable communities, Debbie Kasper participated in an intensive Permaculture Course at the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology in Summertown, Tenn. Here, she has fun getting dirty with a natural building technique known in Mexico as “zacatlantiloli.”

Those members of the Sweet Briar community who were not globetrotting this summer were not exactly resting on their laurels. There was a lot of activity stateside as well. Here’s what some of them were up to:

Debbie Durham

Debbie Durham, professor of anthropology, worked on several scholarly writing projects, including “Figuring the Future: Children, Youth, and Globalization,” with Jennifer Cole of the University of Chicago.

She also wrote a review essay of four recent books on youth and children for a “theme issue” of Anthropological Quarterly and revised an article on clothing in Botswana for “The Encyclopedia of Dress.”

In addition, she sent off a set of articles on the theme of “disgust” to the journal Ethnos.

She also prepared for an upcoming sabbatical, during which she will spend a year in Turkey with the aid of a Fulbright grant. There, she will study aging, class and modernity in Turkey.

John Goulde

Religion professor John Goulde worked on a paper to be presented in Korea on the 14th-century Confucian scholar, Mokun Yi Saek. He plans to present the paper in November.

He also worked on three papers on Korean religions and film, which will be presented at the Korea Society in New York City, and helped organize two panels on Korean religions at the American Academy of Religion Conference in San Diego.

Goulde also did volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity and St. Francis of Assisi Church this summer, as well as major house repairs and gardening on his property.

Jill Granger

Chemistry professor Jill Granger’s biggest summer projects involved SCHEV’s “Improving Teacher Quality” program, which is funded under Title IIA of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The 2006-07 grant wrapped up in June with a series of six inquiry-based science and math courses involving teachers from an eight-county region over a two-week period. Teachers took classes for graduate credit in math and science.

Taught mostly by SBC science/math faculty, the classes have been so popular that the College received a supplementary grant from SCHEV to expand the summer program.

The 2007-08 grant will kick off in August with a two-day workshop on teaching and learning using inquiry. This workshop was the first part of a graduate course in education on “Inquiry Methods in Math and Science.”

During the year-long course the teacher participants — again, drawn from an eight-county region — will be engaged in implementation and assessment of inquiry-based lessons in math and science in their own classrooms. The teachers will return to campus throughout the 2007-08 academic year.

Granger also took on new duties as associate dean.

Larry Janow

Larry Janow, adjunct professor of government and international affairs, spent some time this summer researching a class he will teach this fall, Politics of Legal Order. In June, he also conducted his son’s wedding ceremony in Nashville, Ind.

Debbie Kasper

This summer, Debbie Kasper, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, continued her research on the development of sustainable community, focusing on the complex combination of factors that give rise to more or less sustainable practices at both an individual and societal level.

With the help of the Mednick Fellowship, she explored potential applications of permaculture — an approach to creating abundance in human settlements that have a regenerative relationship with the land.

Part of that involved research at the Ecovillage Training Center in Tennessee and participation in their Permaculture Fundamentals course. She will attend two conferences in August to present the preliminary results of her work.

Alex Kuhn

New swimming coach Alex Kuhn is working towards his MBA at the University of Iowa.

Hillary London

Hillary London attended the National Association for Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators conference in Denver. In addition to recruiting for Sweet Briar’s 2007-08 lacrosse team, she also worked at the Merestead lacrosse camp — run by former SBC lacrosse coach and 1987 alumna Missy Ackerman — and her own camp at Vassar College.

Angelo Metzidakis

Angelo Metzidakis, professor of French, studied modern standard Arabic at Yale University, his alma mater. Over the past few years, he has taught several courses dealing with French-language novels written by Arabic-speaking authors from Northern Africa. He is studying Arabic language and culture in order to understand more fully the social and cultural aspects of those novels.

Barbara Perry

Barbara Perry, government and international affairs professor, will return this fall from a leave of absence. During the 2006-07 academic year, she served as a senior fellow, and civics education director at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center.

Her summer activities have included the following:

She wrote a book chapter about the new Catholic majority on the U.S. Supreme Court and its impact on church/state and abortion cases. The chapter views John F. Kennedy’s victory over anti-Catholicism in 1960 as a turning point in American political development.

• She completed an article, “The Supreme Court and Popular Culture,” which traces the history of the Court in the popular consciousness, especially in movies, novels and television.
• From June 14-26, she was in Washington, D.C., as one of the leaders of the Supreme Court Summer Institute for Teachers, which introduced 60 educators from around the nation to the highest court in the land.
• She attended the last two “Opinion Mondays” of the Court’s term, when it handed down final decisions. She also met with Chief Justice Roberts and one of the associate justices at receptions for the Institute.

  Also, while in D.C., she met with McConnell Scholars from the University of Louisville to make a presentation on the Supreme Court for them, as well as accompany them to the Court and the White House.

• From July 15-20, associate professor of government Steve Bragaw and Perry taught 15 educators from Kentucky in a program titled, “The Rivalry That Shaped America: Thomas Jefferson v. John Marshall.”

  The professional development seminar was held in Charlottesville and Richmond, with visits to Monticello, the John Marshall House and the Virginia Capitol.

• She also led and taught in the McConnell Center’s Young Leaders Academy for Louisville high school students from July 24-26. The title of the program was “‘Vote or Die’? Tackling the Debates of 2008.”

  The program provided a retrospective on the 2006 congressional elections and introduced students to the issues that will frame the 2008 presidential contests. Speakers included leaders in national, state and local politics, as well as journalists and political scientists.

• She also researched and wrote a short article on John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier for the Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History and penned a revised edition of her book “The Supremes: An Introduction to the U.S. Supreme Court Justices.”
• Her latest book, “The Michigan Affirmative Action Cases,” will debut this month and will be unveiled at the national meeting of the American Political Science Association in Chicago over Labor Day weekend.

Raina Robeva

Associate professor of math Raina Robeva finalized galley proofs for a textbook, “An Invitation to Biomathematics” and the accompanying “Laboratory Manual of Biomathematics,” for which she is the lead author.

Jim Kirkwood and Robin Davies from Sweet Briar are co-authors, along with other authors from the University of Virginia. The books will be released Sept. 10.

Robeva co-directed — with Robin Davies and Appalachian State University professor — a college faculty workshop, “Computational and Mathematical Biology” sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America. The workshop was held at Sweet Briar, June 10-16, and was attended by 29 math and biology faculty from colleges and universities across the United States.

This month, she is offering a short course, “Implementing Biology Across the mathematics Curriculum” for college and university faculty sponsored by the Society of Mathematical Biology and the Mathematical Association of America. It is a joint effort with faculty from various universities. Her lecture will be on probability and statistics-based models.

She will also present a talk at MathFest Aug. 3 through 5 in San Jose, Calif. The lecture, “Desegregating Mathematics and Biology,” will be presented during a session titled “Biomathematics in the First Two Years.”

Nick and Jana Ross

Nick and Jana Ross, both on the music faculty, performed at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival in July.

Jim Scow

Jim Scow, visiting assistant professor of philosophy, worked with Randolph College professor John Justice on Justice’s paper, “The Origin of Extensions by Semantic Selection.” He also plans to work with Randolph professor David Schwartz on his book manuscript on consumer ethics.

At home, he remodeled a bathroom, organized the founding meeting of the Daniel’s Hill Historic District Association, and served as chairperson of the Daniel’s Hill Neighborhood Watch. He also is considering running for Lynchburg City Council.

Brent Shea

As vice president of Ius Primi Viri — an international human rights education association based in Rome — anthropology and sociology professor Brent Shea spent some time at U.N. headquarters in New York City.

There, he participated in a briefing on the recent and ongoing work of the General Assembly. Topics of discussion included the ongoing reviews of U.N. mandates, U.N. system-wide coherence, Security Council reform, and the U.N. Capital Master Plan.

As a member of the editorial executive board of the International Scope Review, he reviewed articles submitted for possible publication. He also reviewed paper proposals submitted for an international conference of the association that publishes that journal.

This summer, Shea also was invited to review research project proposals for two U.S. Department of Education grants agencies.

Steve Wassell

“Andrea Palladio: Villa Cornaro in Piombino Dese,” a book co-authored by mathematics professor Steve Wassell and architectural historian Branko Mitrovic, was published in June.

Wassell also worked on a couple of Palladio paper proposals, one for the 2008 Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference and one for the Nexus Network Journal, an online and print journal focused on the relationships between architecture and mathematics.

Loretta Wittman

Loretta Wittman, associate professor of theater and dance, choreographed the musical “Seussical” and taught Musical Theatre Dance and Broadway 101 as part of the four-week Encore Theatre Workshop held at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lynchburg.

Natasha Copeland

Natasha Copeland, visiting assistant professor of French, is having her first child this summer.