Faculty Notes, September 10, 2012

Mark Axelrod, Ph.D., professor, Department of English, Wilkinson College, has a new screenplay, Stayin’ Alive, which will be produced by Cuckoo Clock Productions, Hamburg, Germany.  Principal photography is set for April, 2013.  His fourth book on screenwriting, Characters talking: Talking characters, will be published by Continuum Publishers in fall, 2013.

Stephen Berens, assistant professor, Department of Art, Wilkinson College, has an installation on display at the Carl Solway Gallery, specifically designed for the Cincinnati, Ohio., gallery. The photographic exhibit, “Thinking of Pinturicchio (While Looking Out Sol LeWitt’s Windows)” was shot while in residents at Sol Le Witt’s studio in Spoleto, Italy, in June 2012. It opens Sept. 7 and will be on display along with two other interconnected exhibits, remains up through Dec. 22. Professor Berens’ Thinking of Pinturicchio (While Looking Out Sol LeWitt’s Windows) will run

The project is a result of thinking about how both LeWitt and Pinturicchio, though working 500 years apart, had a number of concerns in common including the incorporation of the architectural space itself into the artwork. The over 200 images in this installation are printed on adhesive matte vinyl panels mounted directly on the walls.

Pamela Blanc, adjunct faculty, Conservatory of Music, College of Performing Arts, gave the F. M. Alexander Memorial Lecture in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the American Society for the Alexander Technique. The AmSAT conference was held at the Juilliard School in Manhattan where Blanc addressed more than 250 Alexander teachers from the U.S. and abroad. Blanc is a well-established and respected Alexander Technique instructor and has taught the Alexander Technique in the performing arts for more than 30 years. Her talk, titled “The Living Memory,” will be published in the Alexander Journal, fall 2012.

Hesham El-Askary, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Schmid College of Science and Technology, is the principal author of a paper in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews, Computational methods for climate data. WIREs Comp Stat, 4: 359–374. doi: 10.1002/wics.1213. Co-authors include Schmid colleagues Mohamed Allali, Ph.D., associate professor; Cyril Rakovski, Ph.D., assistant professor; Anup Prasad, Ph.D., assistant professor, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., professor, and Daniele Struppa, Ph.D., professor and chancellor, (2012

Kelly Kennedy, Ph.D., assistant professor, College of Educational Studies, has been appointed editor of the peer-reviewed  journal, Trainers Forum. The journal is a publication of the national organization, Trainers of School Psychology, which is committed to innovation and excellence in graduate training programs for specialist and doctoral programs for school psychologists.  As such, the Trainers Forum has a tremendous influence on higher education as well as the practice of school psychology.  Kennedy’s editorship is effective now through the summer of 2015.

Robin Kish, assistant professor, Department of Dance, College of Performing Arts, co-chaired the program committee this summer for the 30th anniversary of the “Medical Problems of Performing Artists” symposium in Snowmass, Colo.  This international symposium had a record number of attendees, with presenters from all over the world.  Honorees for this year included Jacques d’Amboise (a dancer with New York City Ballet and founder of National Dance Institute) and Cho Liang Lin (concert violinist).  In addition to co-chairing this symposium, Robin mentored seven undergraduate research students who presented five unique research projects: Natalie  Iscovich (’13), Kristen Robinson (’13), Molly Myers (’13), Emily Duncan (’13), Keila Halili (’13), Taryn Kau’iliani (’13), and Samantha Sobash (’12).

Kish also co-directed the second annual “Healthy Approaches in the Training of Dancers” conference held at the Partridge Dance Center on campus in August. Kish, along with Janice Plastino, Ph.D., professor emeritus of dance at the University of California Irvine, brought in physical therapists, dance educators, a psychologist and a nutritionist to present.  The keynote speaker, Bonnie Robson M.D., is an expert in dance psychology and has spent her career working with dancers in Canada.  This year’s conference had more than 50 attendees and promises to grow into a larger event each year, possibly expanding the scope to include medical and training issues related to music and theatre.

Martin Nakell, Ph.D., professor, and Rebecca Goodman (04, MFA) read from their original fiction at the École Normale Supérieure held in Paris this June as part of the Paris &NOW Festival. &NOW is a festival of avant-garde literature and art that moves from venue to venue. It was hosted at Chapman in 2008. The École Normale Supérieure is considered the most prestigious university in Europe, whose graduates include Louis Pasteur, Jean Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, et alia. Nakell and Goodman organized the panel on which they read around the principle of a new significance of music and the lyrical in the language and image of fiction, as opposed to at least one current trend to dispose of those qualities. The panel was so well-received that the founding director of &NOW, professor Steve Tomasula,  wrote that this was the panel “that did America the proudest in Paris.” Nakell and Goodman look forward to continuing this thematic pursuit with a similar panel at &NOW at the University of Denver in 2013.

Alicia Okouchi-Guy, associate professor, Department of Dance, College of Performing Arts, and Don Guy, assistant professor, Department of Theatre, College of Performing Arts, were invited by Chapman University Chancellor Daniele Struppa to be a part of the Chapman Visiting Scholars Series at the Nicholas Academic Center in Santa Ana. Their presentation on “The Art of Science” included a lecture and demonstration that featured dance majors Chris Babcock ’14, Joe Chantry ’14, and Rachel Leitson ’14.

Timothy Shields, Ph.D., assistant professor, Argyros School of Business and Economics, and Baohua Xin, a research colleague at the University of Toronto, were awarded a $10,000 Steve Berlin/CITGO Grant to conduct experimental research on how companies can encourage different departments within the organization to gain trust and develop better cooperation.

The purpose of the Steve Berlin/CITGO Grant program is to foster academics’ understanding of the contemporary external reporting and governance challenges faced by preparers. The four-person committee awarded one award this year. The committee is chaired by the American Accounting Association’s Vice President-Research and Publications with representatives from the Financial Accounting and Reporting, Management Accounting, and Auditing Sections of the American Accounting Association.

In addition, Shields recently presented at the 24th annual meeting of Human Behavior and Evolution Society: http://abs-hbes.unm.edu/;  the California Workshop of Evolutionary Perspectives of Human Behavior in San Luis Obispo: https://www.facebook.com/threeUC; and at the Canadian Academic Accounting Association 2012 annual meeting at Charlettetown, Prince Edward Island.

Ramesh Singh, Ph.D.,  professor, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Schmid College of Science and Technology, has had his journal  Geomatics, Natural Hazards and Risk Journal published by Taylor and Francis, accepted for inclusion in in Web of Science by Thomson Reuters. The Journal includes research papers dealing with new concepts, approaches and case studies using geospatial (GIS and GPS) and remote sensing techniques to study monitoring, mapping, risk management and mitigation, risk vulnerability and early warning of natural hazards. All types of articles related to natural hazards associated with land, ocean, atmosphere, land-ocean-atmosphere coupling and those induced by climate change are included. In addition, also focuses on the emerging problems related to multi-hazard risk assessment, multi-vulnerability risk assessment, risk quantification, economic aspects of hazards, visualization and communication.

Doug Sweet, instructor, Department of English, Wilkinson College, and Director of Undergraduate Writing, has published a new textbook, Contexts & Choices: A Guide to Practical Writing, published by Kendall-Hunt.

Dawn Bonker

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