Professional activities and accomplishments of Sarah Lawrence faculty.
In August 2017, Yale University Press published Enraged: Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths by Emily Katz Anhalt (classics). The book offers lessons from ancient Greece on how modern nations can develop and maintain a civil society and reduce violence. In September, Enraged was featured and favorably reviewed in The New York Times.
Adam Brown (psychology) received a Fulbright Specialist Award to spend August 2017 working with refugees in Bern, Switzerland’s University Hospital. He also received a grant from the New York University Program for Medical Education Innovations and Research. His NYU-funded project seeks to determine whether certain first- and second-year medical residents can reduce mental health concerns and occupational burnout through resilience training. In addition, Brown co-authored several journal articles, including: “Can an experimental self-efficacy induction through autobiographical recall modulate analogue posttraumatic intrusions?” in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry; “Coping flexibility predicts posttraumatic stress disorder and depression in human rights advocates” in the International Journal of Mental Health; and “Neuropsychological Predictors of Trauma Centrality in OIF/OEF Veterans” in Frontiers in Psychology.
“From Charity to Solidarity: The Promise and Challenges of Service Learning in Labor Courses” by Kimberly Christensen (economics) is being published in the 2017 International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, volume 8, number 4.
Königshausen & Neumann published Sehnsucht nach Sinn by Roland Dollinger (German/literature) in June 2017. The book’s title translates to “longing for the meaning of life” and discusses nine authors who questioned how modern human beings would find or construct a meaningful existence in the post-religious culture that followed philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead.
Charlotte Doyle (psychology) published “Teaching as a Creative Process: Perspectives from Personal Narratives” in the journal Creativity: Theory-Research-Applications in June 2017 and “Creative Flow as a Unique Cognitive Process” in the cognition section of Frontiers in Psychology in August 2017.
Excerpts from the book Amérika: The Post-Election Malas 1-9 by Suzanne Gardinier (writing) appeared in the summer 2017 “Rebel Cities” issue of Blunderbus Magazine and the spring/summer 2017 issue of H.O.W. Journal.
In June 2017, Peggy Gould (dance) performed in Getting Away with Murder by Patricia Hoffbauer at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre in New York City, along with Yvonne Rainer, Tom Rawe, Jenny Way, Peter Richards, Alyssa Alpine, India Gonzalez, Ananda Gonzalez, and alumni Mor Mendel MFA ’14, Gordon Landenberger ’11, and Patrick Gallagher ’12. Gould also performed in SlowDancing/TrioA, a video installation by David Michalek in collaboration with Yvonne Rainer. The video screened at Danspace Project in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in June and July 2017.
Sarah Hamill (art history) was awarded a 2017 fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies for her project Surface Matters: Contemporary Photography and the Metaphor of Sculpture. She was also awarded a six-month Wallace Fellowship by Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, for her project The Photographic Detail and Sculptural Seeing.
In April 2017, Michelle Hersh (biology) was awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation in collaboration with Bard College biologist Cathy Collins to study whether landscape fragmentation (the breaking up of habitats into smaller pieces) has a positive or negative impact on plant diversity. The team began field work in Kansas a few months later, joined by La Zhen Han ’19 and Madison Rosandich ’20.
Over the spring and summer, Greg MacPherson (theatre) designed lighting for numerous shows: a benefit reading of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden presented by The Acting Company, starring Angela Lansbury and directed by Frank Dunlop, at Hunter College’s Kaye Playhouse; evenings A and C of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s 2017 Marathon of One Act Plays; the new musical Camp Wewannatapaway, presented by SHUFFLES Broadway Tap & Musical Theater School at the Kaye Playhouse; Fernando, presented by New Ohio Theatre; and series A and B of the 2017 Summer Shorts festival at 59E59 Theaters.
In April 2017, Nicolaus Mills (literature) published a review of Geoffrey M. White’s book Memorializing Pearl Harbor: Unfinished Histories and the Work of Remembrance in the American Historical Review. In the same month, The Daily Beast published Mills’s article “The One Graduation Speech Millennials Need to Hear.” In May, The Forward published his article “J. D. Salinger’s Holocaust Story Eerily Echoes Anne Frank.”
In June, John O’Connor (visual and studio arts) was awarded a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship. Out of 706 applications for this year’s Summer Fellowship, 69 artists working in seven disciplines were selected; O’Connor was one of 10 visual artists to make the cut. MacDowell, the nation’s leading artist colony, was founded in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1907. MacDowell Fellows have won scores of Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, Grammys, National Medals for the Arts, and many other honors. MacDowell history also boasts two notable SLC alumni: Meredith Monk ’64 and Alice Walker ’65.
Philip Ording (mathematics) co-edited Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts, published by Springer in June 2017. The book aims to appeal to a wide audience—including readers of art history, philosophy, and science—by bridging the cultures of art and math using the phenomenon of simplicity.
Kevin Pilkington (writing) won a 2017 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) for his collection Where You Want to Be: New and Selected Poems. He participated in Fordham University’s Poets Out Loud Reading Series at Lincoln Center in March 2017 and taught a poetry workshop at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in Tarrytown in April. In September, Pilkington read poetry at Curley’s Diner in Stamford, Connecticut, and in October at Cornelia Street Café in New York City and the Poetry Institute in New Haven. His poem “It’s About Time” was featured in April by the Norwalk, Connecticut, bus transit system, and his poem “Mingus” was published in the spring/summer 2017 edition of the Valparaiso Poetry Review.
In April, Tristana Rorandelli (Italian) participated in the roundtable “Teaching Paola Masino” at the American Association for Italian Studies 2017 Annual Conference at Ohio State University in Columbus.
Shahnaz Rouse (sociology) is currently working on three essays based on her research on colonial Lahore, Pakistan: the first on its political economy; the second on the colonial state, missionaries, and higher education in the city; and the third on memory and history. The third is an expanded version of the public talk she gave in April 2017 at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies, Lahore School of Economics, “Lahore Fragments: Colonial Contradictions and their Afterlife.” Between February and May 2017, Rouse was a visiting research scholar at the Institute, where she advised the director on the school’s curriculum and contributed to plans for a revised edition of The Cambridge History of Pakistan. She will also be contributing a chapter to the book, focusing on the political economy of colonial Lahore. In addition, Rouse mentored several graduate students, advising them on their thesis proposals, and taught two sessions of the graduate seminar “Research Methods” (one on archival research, one on ethnographic and qualitative research methods). Also in 2017, Rouse reviewed essays for the journal Dialectical Anthropology, for which she serves as a book review editor, and wrote reviews for several other publications in the US and UK.
In 2017, Fons Vitae published a translation by Kristin Zahra Sands (religion) of the first fifth of Abu l-Qasim al-Qushayri’s Lata’if al-Isharat. Subtle Allusions is part of the Great Commentaries on the Holy Qur’an series of the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought. The translation has also been made available as a downloadable PDF. (Altafsir.com)
Improvement, a new novel by Joan Silber ’67 (writing), will be published in November 2017 by Counterpoint. Improvement tells the story of a single mother with a boyfriend just out of jail, a knowing and eccentric aunt with a past in Turkey, and a decision that leads to an accidental death with consequences for many.
Stuart Spencer MFA ’10 (theatre) recently became a featured columnist for the blog OnStage, writing critical essays on plays and musicals playing in New York. In August 2017, he interviewed Ellen Winter ’14, co-creator of the world’s first podcast musical, 36 Questions.
In March 2017, Robin Starbuck (filmmaking and moving image arts) completed the field work for her new film, The Stag’s Mirror, in Amatenango, Mexico. The film has since been screened at Casa del Pan Cinema in Chiapas, Mexico; the Na Bolom Museum and Indigenous Research Center in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico; the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in Middlebury, Vermont; and the Frostbite Film Festival in Colorado Springs, Colorado (where it won Best Experimental Film), among others. Starbuck received support from the Ellen Schloss Flamm and Family Endowed Fund for Faculty Research and Development to attend a screening and discussion of The Stag’s Mirror at the Ethnografilm Paris festival in France in April 2017, where she also showed the short film Seeing Glass by Hannah Rifkin ’16. In June, she was awarded an Artist in Residence Fellowship at the Brush Creek Artists Foundation in Saratoga, Wyoming. Starbuck also received a grant from the College’s program in arts and technology, which is supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. The grant allowed her to take Jeremiah Davis ’16 and Sofia Seidel ’17 to Chiapas in July to work on the crew of her new intermedia film project, How We See Water.
Kathy Westwater MFA ’01 (dance) enjoyed a busy spring with the New York City premiere of her evening-length work Anywhere, presented at Brooklyn Studios for Dance in April 2017. Performed to Henryk Górecki’s “Symphony No. 3” by five dancers including Ilona Bito ’10 and Hadar Ahuvia ’09, Anywhere asked how a dance might engage with and itself be a monument.
In April 2017, John Yannelli MFA ’82 (music) composed original music for the film The Stag’s Mirror by Robin Starbuck (filmmaking and moving image arts). In May, he published “While Thy Branches Mix With Mine,” the second in a song cycle titled “Of Love and Loss,” as well as the piano solo “Pavana for Hannah.” In May, he published “The Warm Up,” music for a dance performance of the same name performed by BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance at the Southampton Cultural Center in August. “The Warm Up” featured Glenn Alexander (music) on electric bass.