Faculty News Spring 2008:

Faculty News Spring 2008

Donna M. Nickitas (Nursing) has been named editor in chief of Nursing Economic$, a professional journal that seeks to advance nursing leadership by providing information and analysis on emerging practices in healthcare management, economics, and policymaking.  Nickitas, who is the graduate specialty coordinator of the Dual Degree MS/MPA Program at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, has been a member of the Nursing Economic$ Editorial Board since 2006.  

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In an op-ed titled “Cleaning Up This Mess Won’t Be Pretty” in the March 24 edition of Globe and Mail, Howard Chernick (Economics) reviews the headline-making financial events of recent months and reminds readers that on Monday, March 10, the “venerable “ investment banking firm of Bear Stearns “was assuring the markets that their $30-billion of reserves was ample to weather any demands on their capital,” but by Friday, March 14, “they were in total meltdown.”  Stressing that “the slippery slope to total destruction can be terrifyingly steep,” Chernick goes on to point out that other financial institutions are “similarly exposed…and vulnerable” and that the consequences of events in the financial markets are being felt in the “real economy” of jobs, construction, and housing.  “Ultimately, the whole mess reflects a serious failure of regulation,” he concludes, adding: “The U.S., as the largest economy and the world’s most important financial player, bears a special responsibility to provide the global public good of a prudent regulatory environment.”

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The Continuum International Publishing Group recently published Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed by Gerald Press (Philosophy), an in-depth and wide-ranging account of Plato’s philosophy and his major works and ideas.  Geared toward the specific requirements of students seeking a thorough understanding of Plato’s thought, the book also provides a survey of the history of Platonic interpretation and Plato’s far-reaching influence.  “Plato laid the foundations for the whole history of western thought,” notes the publisher, “and his work is still studied by every student of philosophy.  Yet his thought and writings continue to evoke perplexity in readers.”  Press’s book, continues the description of the work, provides a guide to Plato’s complex thought and explores the “particular complexities of the dialogue form” that Plato used.  Adds a review of A Guide for the Perplexed, “Press gives us the information we need to have at our fingertips, but his suggestions only increase the excitement of reading the dialogues themselves.”

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Diane Rendon (Nursing), director of the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing, has been named to the Hall of Fame of the Nursing Education Alumni Association of Teachers College Columbia University.  The ceremony will take place on April 18 at Teachers College during the NEAA’s 45th Annual Isabel Maitland Stewart Conference on Research in Nursing and Annual Awards Ceremony.

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March 2008 Faculty & Staff E-Bulletin

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Faculty News Winter 2008:

Hunter Professors Contributed to Nobel Prize-winning Report on Climate Change

Two Hunter geography professors, Allan Frei and William Solecki, played a part in the work done by the United Nations panel on climate change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

The prizewinning organization is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN network of scientists.  When the Peace Prize was awarded last fall, the Norwegian Nobel Committee praised both the IPCC and Vice President Gore for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change.”  The committee further lauded IPCC, which is made up of 2,000 scientists and is considered the world’s leading authority on climate change, for creating “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.”

Both Frei and Solecki were contributing authors to the multi-volume IPCC report that resulted in the Nobel Prize.  Frei contributed to the evaluation of how accurately the climate models studied by IPCC simulated snow cover around the world.  Climate models, he explained, are mathematical simulations of the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and land surface and are used to estimate the range of possible climate changes in the future.  “Scientists from all over the world,” he continued, “develop various scenarios regarding future emission of gases that affect climate, and the climate models translate those emission scenarios into a range of possible climatic changes.  IPCC included a section on snow cover because the accuracy with which a model simulates snow cover plays an important role in the accuracy of climate simulation in general.”

Frei is a Hunter faculty member as well as deputy director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities.

Solecki, who is director of the Institute for Sustainable Cities and a past chair of the Hunter Department of Geography, contributed material to the IPCC report’s section on the impact of environmental developments on human society.  A specialist in urban environmental change and management, land cover studies, and hazards, among other areas, he was a contributing author for the report’s chapter on Industry, Settlement, and Society and the chapter on North America.

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BARBARA L. HAMPTON (Music) presented a paper, “Rappin’ Ga: Hiplife and Some Myths of Globalization”, chaired a panel, “Urbanism and Music” at the 51st Conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) hosted by the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  She also presented the keynote address, “Engaged Ethnomusicology: Debates, Prospects and Positionings”, at the joint conference of the Mid-Atlantic Folklore Association (American Folklore Society) and the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the SEM hosted by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation celebrating Virginia’s 400th year (spring 2007).  Along with the performers themselves, she authored the liner notes for the CD Congo Square by Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Yacub Addy and Odadaa, honoring the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the African ancestors of New Orleans.  Dr. Hampton received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology at its Silver Jubilee Conference---one of only four persons to ever receive this award.

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Meena Alexander (English) has a new book of poetry, Quickly Changing River, (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press, 2008).  She gave a reading at the Associated Writing Programs conference in New York City as part of the CUNY Gala reading and participated in a panel of Asian American women poets titled "Mother Tongue" (January 31, 2008).  She read from her work at East Stroudsberg University (February 14, 2008) and at New York University’s Asian Pacific American Center (February 29, 2008).  On March 26 she will read in Venice, at the triennial conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literatures: "Try Freedom: Rewriting Rights Through Postcolonial Cultures."  She will also take part in a plenary session entitled "Writing Through Cultures of Terror."  On June 22 she will read from her new book at the Poetry Festival in Parma, Italy.

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A judge in Rhode Island has appointed public health expert Susan Klitzman (Urban Public Health) to advise him on how to proceed with the controversial process of requiring three paint companies to clean up lead-based paints in the state.  Klitzman, who specializes in environmental health and safety, public health policy, and epidemiology, has held several health positions with the City of New York and has coauthored articles on lead abatement and lead poisoning prevention.

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Faculty News Fall 2007:

Mimi Abramovitz (Social Work) delivered the keynote address, on “Welfare Reform: Race, Class and Gender Matter,” at a meeting held at the Center for Social Work of the University of Bielefeld in Germany last November.  She was also the keynote speaker last October at the 90th anniversary dinner of the University of Minnesota School of Social Work, where she spoke on “The Welfare State: A Battlefield for Human Rights?”  In addition, Abramovitz presented a paper on “History of Low-Income Women’s Activism Since 1900” at the Academics and Activism Conference organized by the Women’s Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center.  

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Quickly Changing River, the sixth book of poetry by Meena Alexander (English), will be published at the end of January by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.  Among the poems in the collection—which one critic called “an alluvial force of surprises…beckoning us closer…to its urgent and magical sources”—are a group of poems addressed to Alexander’s 80-year-old mother, who lives in South India; a section evoking the words of a man who escaped slavery in the Sudan, where the author spent much of her childhood; and elegies to the poet Audre Lorde—who taught at Hunter and was Alexander’s friend—and the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.  About her 2004 book of poems, Raw Silk, one critic writes: “Alexander’s vivid, sensual poems catalog American life from an immigrant’s and a woman’s point of view.”  And of the new book, Eavan Boland writes: “These poems are a sustained elegy for homelessness, for the displacement at the heart of human life.”  Alexander, whose poems have been translated into several languages including Arabic, French, Hindi, Italian, Macedonian, and Spanish, is also the editor of Indian Love Poems (Everyman’s Library), a collection of poems dating from 600 B.C. to the present day. 

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Jessie Daniels (Urban Public Health) is the author of “Race, Civil Rights & Hate Speech in the Digital Era,” a chapter in Learning Race & Ethnicity, a groundbreaking volume released by MIT Press (December 2007).  The book is part of a new six-volume series on digital media and learning published by MIT Press and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.  The aim of the series is to examine the effect of digital media on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. Authors in the series were selected through a competitive application process.

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Marc Edelman (Anthropology) is a co-author of Social Democracy in the Global Periphery: Origins, Challenges, Prospects  (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which he discussed in a roundtable on the book at the Montreal Congress of the Latin American Studies Association.  At the same Congress, which took place in September, he also took part in a session on “After the Handshakes: Living Transition and Paradox in Central America.”  In October he was in Bogota, where he lectured at the Universidad del Rosario and presented an inaugural keynote titled “Transnational peasant movements: successes and challenges, paradoxes and propects” at the symposium on “Who are today’s peasants? Dialogues about anthropology and rural studies in Colombia,” which was part of the Twelfth National Congress of Anthropology.

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Jack Hammond (Sociology) spoke at two venues in Angola that dealt with human rights in the academy.  In mid-October he spoke at a conference, held in Luanda at the Catholic University of Angola, which addressed the creation of human rights programs at Angolan universities.  Other invited speakers at the conference, which was organized by the university’s Center for Studies and Scientific Research, came from Brazil, Denmark, Portugal, and South Africa.  He later spoke on the same subject at the Lobito branch of the Lusiadas University.  Hammond, who conducts research on human rights and rural social movements in Latin America and the World Social Forum, is former chair of the Latin American Studies Association task force on human rights and academic freedom.   

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Joyce Griffin-Sobel, director of undergraduate programs in the Hunter College School of Nursing, and Leighsa Sharoff, assistant professor, have been selected by the National League for Nurses to be Health Information Technology Scholars (HITS). The project is a multi-year $1.5 million grant, supported by Health Resources and Service Administration Faculty Development: Integrated Technology into Nursing Education & Practice Initiative.  The project is designed to transform teaching and learning in the 21st century by merging informatics, telehealth, simulation and e-learning to create powerful learning environments in nursing education.

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Mary Flanagan (Film and Media Studies) along with her fellow bloggers from their group blog, Grand Text Auto, recently launched an exhibition at the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California at Irvine.  The first blog ever to become a major gallery exhibition, Grand Text Auto, now four years old, is visited 200,000 times a month.  The Beall Center show opened October 4 and will run through December 15.  For more on the blog, see http://grandtextauto.org. Flanagan is also co-editor of a new book from MIT Press, re: skin, a collection of works by short-story writers, scholars, and essayists who present their perspectives on skin as boundary and surface, metaphor and physical reality. 

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As part of the annual Docfest held in October at the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio), Steve Gorelick (Film and Media Studies) spoke about the role played by the PBS series POV in promoting and encouraging the art of the documentary with an independent point of view.  A member of the 20th-anniversary advisory committee of the series, Gorelick led a panel, featuring several prominent filmmakers, that marked POV’s anniversary.  

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Prizewinning playwright Tina Howe (Theatre), whose awards include an Obie Award for Distinguished Playwriting, an Outer Critics Circle Award, the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play for Pride’s Crossing, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, was recently named the 2007 honoree of the Horton Foote American Playwrights Festival given by Baylor University.  As part of the festival, held in October, the Baylor Theatre presented Howe’s play Museum.   

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Christa Davis Acampora (Philosophy) is co-editor of two books published this year by the State University of New York Press—Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul: Transformative Aesthetics and the Practice of Freedom; and Cultural Sites of Critical Insight: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and African American and Native American Women’s Writings.  “The organizing idea for each book,” explains Acampora, “is that social and political progress requires not only what is traditionally considered as cognitive development but also expansion of aesthetic agency—the sensibilities that sharpen our perceptual capacities and fuel creative activity.”  Unmaking Race, Remaking Soul, which explores the theme of aesthetic agency and its potential for social and political progress, analyzes cultural productions through which women of color have challenged and undermined social and political forces that work to oppress them.  Cultural Sites of Critical Insight explores the interplay between artistic values and social, political, and moral concerns in writings by African American and Native American women.

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Jennifer Richmond Bryant (Urban Public Health) is co-principal investigator of a project that will study how air moves in subway stations in order to determine how people are exposed to contaminants in the stations.  Titled “Dispersion of Threat Agents in a Scale Model of a Subway Station to Inform Exposure Estimates,” the study has just received a one-year $40,000 CUNY Collaborative Incentive Grant from the CUNY Central Office.  To conduct their research, the investigators are building a scale model of a subway station and will conduct two experiments: in one experiment, they will fill the glass-enclosed model with smoke; and in the second, they will release smoke from single points in the model.  The smoke, explains Richmond Bryant, will enable the investigators to visualize air flow patterns “if, for example, someone sneezes on a platform or if someone releases a threat agent.”  Ultimately, she continues, the knowledge gained in the investigation may be used to enhance safety in subway stations.

 

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Great Food, Great Sex (Ballantine/Random House 2006), the most recent of Robert Fried’s (Psychology) seven books, has been widely acclaimed by American media and has just been published in a Spanish translation by Ediciones Martinez-Roca, a major publishing firm in Barcelona.  A Turkish translation by the Istanbul firm Istiklal Publishing will also be coming out soon.  Great Food, Great Sex, which is essentially about cardiovascular health, includes recipes from a National Institutes of Health nutrition program that promote healthy sexuality as well as heart health.  Fried’s aim in the book, he says, is to “get people to understand that they need to pay attention to their nutrition if they want to improve the quality of their life.”  Another recent Fried book, Breathe Well, Be Well (John Wiley and Sons, 1999), was published in Russian by the Kiev company Popuri Press in 2005.  Breathe Well outlines a program to relieve stress, anxiety, hypertension, migraine, and other disorders.

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September 2007 Faculty & Staff E-Bulletin

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Faculty News Summer 2007:

Karen Kern's (History) article, "Rethinking Ottoman Frontier Policies: Marriage and Citizenship in the Province of Iraq," was published in The Arab Studies Journal, Spring 2007.  The article was also cited by Chris Townsing in his review of recent literature on Sunni-Shi`i relations in Iraq in the July 2, 2007 issue of The Nation.

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Cynthia Degazon (Nursing) recently received a three-year grant of $950,000 to continue the BEST Program (Becoming Excellent Students in Transition to Nursing), which seeks to reduce the nursing shortage and to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the nursing profession. The grant, which follows another three-year award (for $895,000), was given by the Health Resources and Services Administration of the national Department of Health and Human Services. In addition, Degazon won an award from Nursing Spectrum, a major national magazine in the nursing profession which gives annual awards for excellence in several categories and in different regions across the country. Degazon, who received the New York-New Jersey area award for mentoring, was cited for “mentoring high school and college students, faculty colleagues, and clinical peers with equal passion, enthusiasm, and dedication” and for “clinical expertise and applied research which have added to nursing knowledge.” An article about Degazon's award appeared in the Barbados newspaper NationNews.com.  The article, "Seen up North--Nurse Rewarded for Excellence," appeared online in the January 6 issue.

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Joyce Toney (Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies) presented a paper on “The Caribbean and the Feminization of Emigration: Effects and Repercussions” at a symposium held June 27 at Brooklyn Borough Hall on “The Caribbean and its Diaspora in the Americas: Challenges and Opportunities in the 21st Century.”  The aim of the symposium, which brought together scholars, policy makers, community leaders, and public officials, was to explore economic, social, cultural, and other issues pertaining to the Caribbean and its descendant communities in North, Central, and South America.  The symposium was presented by the Office of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz in collaboration with the Panamanian Council of New York, Inc.

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Ronnie Ancona (Classics) and Sarah B. Pomeroy (Classics and History, Emerita) have been co-editors of the series “Women of the Ancient World” (Routledge), which aims to offer compact and accessible introductions to the life and historical times of female figures from the ancient world.  Among the volumes that have been published or are forthcoming are Julia Augusti: The Emperor’s Daughter; Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great; Cornelia: Mother of the Gracchi; Terentia, Tullia, and Publilia: The Women of Cicero’s Family; and Julia Domna: Syrian Empress, all of them written by major authors in the field.  The series recently relocated to Oxford University Press, where it will appear under the new series title, “Women in Antiquity,” and will continue to be edited by Ancona and Pomeroy.

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Faculty News Spring 2007:

Two Chicago newspapers, the Chicago Free Press and the Windy City Times, are among the media that have recently covered an ongoing study conducted by Jeffrey Parsons (Psychology) that is investigating methamphetamine and other club drug use among gay and bisexual young adults.  Parsons, who is director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Educational Studies and Training, discussed the study in May at the Howard Brown Health Center in Chicago, where he said that one of his findings is that although the link between methamphetamine use and sex is perceived to be causal, “it’s not as clear-cut as it’s often perceived to be.”  The motivations leading to methamphetamine use, he said, are similar to the motivations to use other drugs, such as the desire to escape loneliness or to be able to be more sociable at parties.  The study follows 400 club drug users in the New York area over one year and its data are currently being analyzed.

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Tracy Dennis (Psychology) has won a KOI Career Development Award from the National Institute of Health to support her research in the antecedents, correlatives, and consequences of emotion regulation in young children.

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Angela Reyes (English) has received a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship through a program to support research by pre-tenured faculty, particularly minority scholars and scholars who seek to promote cross cultural understanding.  Professor Reyes is currently at work on a study of Chinese “cram schools” in New York.

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Kate Parry (English) has won the Fulbright New Century Scholars Fellowship.  The New Century Scholars Fellowship supports efforts to promote literacy in developing or emerging countries.  Ms. Parry’s Fellowship is supporting her work in Ghana where she is helping to develop educational programs to improve reading and writing skills of Ghanaian students.

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Susan Turner-Meiklejohn (Urban Affairs and Planning) has won the Russell Sage Fellowship.  The Russell Sage Foundation, established in 1907, is the leading foundation supporting research and publication in social and civic issues.  This fellowship is full-time support for 10 months to allow the recipient to devote themselves full time to a research project that furthers knowledge in a social science.

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Susan Crile (Art Department) has won the Rockefeller Grant for Residency at Bellagio, Italy.  The Rockefeller Foundation chooses a small cohort of leading artists of various fields as fellows in residence at the famous Bellagio resort on Lake Como in Italy for this highly sought after fellowship.  Artists are given time and space for their own work and ample opportunity for conversation across fields.

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Elizabeth Harmon (Anthropology Department) was invited by Richard Leakey to be a speaker at the exclusive Stony Brook Workshop on Human Evolution.  Richard Leakey, one of the foremost anthropologists and evolutionary scientists, organizes this yearly workshop for leading scholars in the field to come together to report findings of their ongoing research.

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Ronnie Ancona (Classics) is the editor of the recently published volume A Concise Guide to Teaching Latin Literature (University of Oklahoma Press), the first book aimed specifically at keeping teachers up to date on recent developments in Latin scholarship.   Ancona is also the author of the volume’s section on Horace, one of the major writers featured in the book.   In addition, she co-authored “Catullus in the Secondary School Curriculum,” an article in The Blackwell Companion to Catullus (Blackwell, 2007), and wrote “Teaching Latin, Teaching Kids,” which appeared in Classical Journal in 2006.   Earlier this year she co-organized a panel on teaching Catullus for the Classical Association Annual Conference, held in Birmingham, UK, where she delivered a paper on “The Consequences of Pedagogy: Catullus in American Secondary Schools. ”  She also delivered a paper on “Using Scholarship in the Latin Classroom: Rationale and Practice,” at the Pennsylvania Classical Association meeting in Philadelphia this year.

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The 2007 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, one of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards, went to Peter Carey (Creative Writing) for his ninth novel, Theft: A Love Story (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).  The award, first given in 1979, is a top literary prize in Australia.

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Allan Frei (Geography) is working as a guest researcher in the Black Rock Forest in New York’s Hudson Highlands, which has become a regional center for mercury research.  As part of his research, which is described in the spring 2007 issue of Black Rock Forest News, Frei is helping to measure emissions of mercury from soil and snow sources in the forest.  The article also notes that Frei is part of a team examining how environmental factors such as solar radiation, temperature, and rainfall affect mercury emissions—and, consequently, how the mercury cycle might respond to climate change.  In addition, Frei was cited in a report published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for statistical and technical assistance that he contributed to assist the FDA in its analysis of the water quality and the viability of the shellfish industry off the Mississippi coast after Hurricane Katrina.

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Ivone Margulies (Film and Media Studies) was a featured speaker at “The KINO EYE #7: Evacuation,” a film and video show held in April at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, where she spoke on minimalist film.  In March she presented a paper, “1948 Refocusing French Spare Drama,” at the International Film Studies Conference, held at the University of Udine in Italy.  Margulies also was co-organizer of an interdisciplinary conference, “The Trial: Stages of Truth,” held in April at the Center for Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where legal practitioners, human rights scholars, historians, political analysts and scholars of literature and performance studies  explored how trials have influenced other forms of public truth-telling, testimony, and confession.

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Beatrice J. Krauss (Urban Public Health), executive director of the Hunter College Center for Community and Urban Health, and Daniel B. Rosen, the Center’s director of training and professional development, have been invited by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and the New York AIDS Coalition to join a task force that is overseeing implementation of the New York City public schools’ K-12 HIV curriculum and studying possible adoption of comprehensive sex education in the city public schools.  Krauss and Rosen began their work on the task force in early May at a meeting of the task force, where they gave a presentation on the technical update of the K-12 HIV curriculum which was performed by personnel of the Hunter College Center.

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Laboratory tests to assess vulnerability to suicidal thoughts and behavior were on the agenda at a symposium chaired by Regina Miranda (Psychology) at the annual convention of the Association for Psychological Science, held May 24-27 in Washington.  In addition to chairing the session, Miranda also gave a presentation on her research, in which, she explains, “we have been using methods developed in labs to indirectly assess thinking processes that make individuals vulnerable to depression and to thoughts of suicide and engaging in suicidal behaviors.  These methods, which have been used in cognition research, may be helpful to clinicians to assess risk in clinical situations.”

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Frank Mirer (Urban Public Health) brought his expertise to Congress on April 24, when he spoke on what he termed “the breakdown” of standard setting in OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  Speaking at a hearing of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protection of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Mirer said that “OSHA standard setting has ground to a halt in the current administration,” adding that OSHA, “since 2001, has checked out of the standards business.  Slow progress in earlier years has ground to a halt and may even be moving stealthily backward."  Mirer’s testimony was quoted in the Bureau of National Affairs publication, Occupational Safety and Health Reporter, the leading publication in the field.  Also because of his expertise in health and safety matters, Mirer was recently appointed by Governor Eliot Spitzer to the New York State Labor Department Hazard Abatement Board.

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In recent months Meena Alexander (English) has read her poetry and given talks in the New York area, New England, the American West, and India.  In February she read her poetry at the University of Northern Colorado as part of the “Without Borders Literary Festival”; and in March she read from her work at the Bilingual Poetry gathering for International Women’s Day held at the Cornelia Street Café in New York, at Mount Holyoke College, and at a session on “Women at War: Soldiers, Sisters, Survivors,” held at Sarah Lawrence College.  Also in March she gave readings at the International Poetry Symposium held at Delhi University; at Allahababad University, where she also gave a talk titled “Poetics of Dislocation”; and at a reading sponsored by the Poetry Society of India held at the India International Center in New Delhi.  Alexander has also been named an Elector to the American Poets Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York.

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An international conference in honor of Janos Bergou’s (Physics) 60th birthday will be held in Slovakia from June 20-24.  Sponsored by the Research Center for Quantum Information, the conference will draw researchers from Europe, Asia, and North and South America and will focus on recent work in the field of quantum information.  Bergou, who has worked in a number of fields of physics, has focused particularly on quantum optics—the interaction of light and matter—and quantum information—using quantum systems to represent and process information.  Among the areas in which he has made significant contributions is quantum state discrimination: how to distinguish particles with different quantum properties.  He was recently made a Fellow of the Optical Society of America in recognition of his work.  The conference was organized by Bergou’s Hunter colleague Mark Hillery (Physics), who has worked with researchers at the Bratislava research center for more than a dozen years.  “All of us participating in the conference want to honor Janos for his work and as a person,” said Hillery.

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“Recreating Cultural Identity: Immigrants and the Shaping of New York’s Artistic Melting Pot,” an event developed by Nancy Foner (Sociology), was selected to be part of Immigrant History Week in New York City (April 16-22) and was included in a calendar of events from the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs.  Moderated by Foner, the event, which took place April 18 in Hunter’s West Building, included addresses by Margaret Chin (Sociology), Juan Flores (Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies), Philip Kasinitz (Sociology), and Anahi Viladrich (Urban Public Health).  Speakers explored the ways immigration is changing—and enriching—the artistic landscape of the city as the newest New Yorkers and their children develop new identities and carve out lives in the city.

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Donna T. Haverty-Stacke (History) spoke in February on “Political Culture and the Cold War: May Day Becomes America’s Forgotten Holiday, 1945-1960” at a meeting of the New York University Tamiment Library’s Center for the Cold War and the United States.  On April 1 she presented a paper on “American Day and the Ceremony of the Massing of the Colors: Nativist Visions for a Re-Consecrated Nation, 1920-1930” at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting in Minneapolis.  Her article “Creative Opposition to Radical America: 1920s Anti-May Day Demonstrations” will appear in the journal LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas in fall 2007.

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Professor Emeritus Bo Lawergren (Physics), who retired from a 32-year teaching career a few years ago, has received a $55,000 Mellon Foundation Emeritus Fellowship to conduct research on ancient musical instruments.  To carry out the project, he will travel in Japan, China, and Italy this year and next. Explains Lawergren, “While I was teaching and doing research in physics at Hunter, I also wrote on music archaeology and attended the wide range of archaeology seminars available to the New York academic community.” Lawergren has given seminars and lectures on music archaeology at many universities around the world, most recently at Columbia, Harvard, and Tokyo. Over the years he has covered many regions and periods, but is currently writing the first history of early Iranian music (3000 B.C.E. to the Islamic period).

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Steve Gorelick (Film and Media Studies) has been awarded a Fulbright Grant by the German Fulbright Commission.  Under the grant, Gorelick will participate this summer in the 2007 German Studies Seminar, which will involve travel, meetings, and study with colleagues and counterparts throughout Germany.  The topic to be investigated will be “Germany in a Changing Europe: Transatlantic Ties, Transatlantic Challenges.”  The seminar, says Gorelick, will enable him to continue exploring his “interest in the role of media and culture in the postwar recovery and reunification of Germany.”  In addition, in his role as chair of the Board of Advisors of the National Center for Critical Incident Analysis in Washington, Gorelick took part in a “Conference on Covering Crisis” held in November by Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. The conference reviewed media coverage of avian influenza, SARS, and bioterrorism.

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The New York City-based Spanish-language publication El Diario La Prensa has nominated Maria Cornelio (Romance Languages) for its 2007 Mujeres Destacadas Award, which will be presented to Cornelio and the other newly named Distinguished Women at a luncheon in New York City on April 29.  Cornelio runs Hunter’s new Spanish Major Concentration in Translation and Interpretation, which trains students to be professional translators and interpreters.  A Hunter alumna who came to New York from the Dominican Republic when she was 11, Cornelio began interpreting and translating the way many immigrant youngsters do—for her parents—and has firsthand familiarity with the problems that can arise from faulty translations.  She is, she stresses, “interested in ensuring that translators who work with immigrants can convey information accurately,” and, she adds, “We have a lot of poor-quality translations out there, and I’m convinced that the only way to fix that is to have rigorous academic programs.”

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Exceptional Parent magazine has presented Penny Shaw (Curriculum and Teaching) with its Maxwell J. Schleifer Distinguished Service Award for Shaw’s “advocacy on behalf of people in this country living with disabilities.”  The award was presented at the Continental Airlines Arena on April 7 in a pre-game ceremony before the New Jersey Nets played the Washington Wizards.  Shaw is the founder and director of Project Happy, a 26-year-old sports program conducted at Hunter for children, youth, and young adults with disabilities.

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Corporations and Health Watch, the brainchild of Nicholas Freudenberg (Urban Public Health), is a newly developed website that takes aim at corporate influence on public health.  The site points to corporate practices in six industries—alcohol, automobile, firearms, food, pharmaceutical, and tobacco—that harm health.  “Individual behavior and lifestyle are the important influences on health,” says Freudenberg, “but individual choices are made in a social, economic, and environmental context.  By creating social policies that make it easy for people to choose health, we will be able to reduce some of the daunting health problems we face, like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.” The new site is part of Freudenberg’s “Framing Public Health Campaigns” Project, which was funded by a grant from the American Legacy Foundation.  You can visit the site at http://www.corporationsandhealth.org.

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Ehiedu E.G. Iweriebor (Africana and Puerto Rican/Latino Studies) gave a lecture in February at the University of Lagos in Nigeria on “Economic Crisis and Transformation in Nigeria: The Emergence of New Economic Sectors and Sub-Sectors since the 1980s.”

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A three-year grant totaling nearly $350,000 has been awarded to Rosanne Silberman (Special Education) by the Lavelle Fund for the Blind, which has provided funding to Silberman for the last five years.  The grant will support Hunter’s four professional certification tracks in blindness and visual impairment.

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Allan Frei (Geography) was cited in a report published by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for statistical and technical assistance that he contributed to assist the FDA in its analysis of the water quality and the viability of the shellfish industry off the Mississippi coast after Hurricane Katrina.

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Anita Cheng (Dance and Film & Media Studies) has been selected as a U.S. Fulbright scholar and will be teaching a digital media and performance course in the fall at The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Cheng is currently teaching a course called “Technology and the Arts” for Hunter’s dance program, made possible by a technology grant she won last year in collaboration with Dance Program Director Jana Feinman.

 

Jack Caravanos (Urban Public Health) has been invited by the Blacksmith Institute to be one of 20 attendees at a Global Pollution Remediation Fund meeting in October 2007 at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. The purpose of the conference will be to explore the establishment of a fund to clean up the worst toxic legacies in the developing world. The conference will include representatives from recipient countries, donor countries, and multilateral development banks.

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Professor Mick Hurbis-Cherrier (Film & Media Studies) recently published Voice & Vision: The Creative Approach to Narrative Film and DV Production (Focal Press/Elsevier, March 2007).  Voice & Vision is a comprehensive manual for independent filmmakers and film students which provides a solid grounding in the tools, techniques, and processes of narrative filmmaking.  This includes essential and detailed information on relevant film, video, and digital tools; a thorough overview of the filmmaking stages; and the aesthetic considerations for telling a visual story.  Gustavo Mercado, a full time instructor in the Department of Film & Media, was the illustrator for the book.

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Gary Mallon (Social Work) has received a grant of $700,000 from the New York State Office of Children and Families to establish The Adolescent Services Resource Network at the Hunter College School of Social Work.  The Network is a training, technical assistance, and information resource center dedicated to increasing the knowledge and skills of child welfare professionals working with youth ages 14-21 years in the New York City foster care system.  He has also been awarded a $228,000 grant from the New York State Office of Children and Families to establish a Post Graduate Certificate Program in Adoption Therapy to certify social work and mental health practitioners who are employed by public child welfare agencies and those employed by licensed foster care agencies.  This certificate program is one of the first of its type developed in the United States.

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Godfrey Gumbs, Yonatan Abranyos, and Tibab McNeish of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hunter College have recently co-authored and published a paper entitled “Plasma excitations for cylindrical nanotubes with spin splitting” in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.

 

The paper is featured in the March 2007 print version of JPCM and in the current online edition, freely available at the following link: http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/-ffissn=0953-8984/-ff30=all/0953-8984/19/10/106213.

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Faculty News Fall 2006:

Professor Shirley Cohen (Special Education) is the first-place winner of the “East Siders of the Year” OTTY (Our Town Thanks You) Award for her outstanding work at Hunter in the field of education.  This award, given by the newspaper Our Town, recognizes locals who contribute to the quality of the community.

 

Cohen has long been committed to children’s learning and development.  She joined Hunter as director of the Special Development Center in 1971, at a time when there were no laws protecting children with disabilities, and mental conditions were often misunderstood.

 

Cohen sought to address this problem by writing a new curriculum called “Accepting Individual Differences,” which promoted understanding and correct treatment of children with special needs.  She was instrumental in establishing the Hunter College Center for Gifted Studies, and she created the Early Childhood Special Education master’s degree program.  Cohen is currently the director of Hunter’s Autism Center.

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George Patterson (Social Work) was recognized by the Westchester Police Academy for his work as a visiting professor at the Academy’s December 18 graduation ceremony.  Patterson taught the recruits about stressors they will encounter as officers and the adaptive ways of coping.

Patterson was pleased to be honored with a plaque at the ceremony.  “I’m very excited about this,” he said.  “It’s good that they embraced the expertise and invited me in.  The fact that they recognized an outsider is really to their credit.”

Over the past 20 years, Patterson has worked with several police departments, including the NYPD, and he hopes that his efforts benefit officers on and off the job.

Patterson’s professional interests include social work, criminal justice, cognitive-behavioral coping strategies, traumatic stress and work and life stress.

“I really do feel dedicated to improving policing,” he said.  “I can help [officers] deal with stressors both in the community and in their own lives, and I feel good about that.”

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Ivone Margulies (Film and Media Studies) was invited to introduce the first full fledged Chantal Akerman retrospective in Brazil at the 10th Festival of Ethnographic and Documentary Film in Belo Horizonte in November.  She also gave a guest lecture “From Silence of the Sea to The Talking Picture: Staging Ideas in Serial Monologue Films” at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.  In October she presented her recent work on cinema monologues at the Cinema Studies Fall colloquium at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Godfrey Gumbs Named CUNY Distinguished Professor

Dr. Godfrey Gumbs of the Physics Department has been named a CUNY Distinguished Professor.

The Board of Trustees conferred this honor on Dr. Gumbs in recognition of his lifetime of contributions to theoretical physics, including research into some of the most complex problems of condensed matter. It is the latest in a series of well-earned honors for Dr. Gumbs. Last year, he was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar and he received the American Physical Society's highest prize, the Edward A. Bouchet Award.

An extraordinarily active and productive scientist, he has published almost 200 papers - and many research groups around the world carry out work today based on his discoveries.

Dr. Gumbs, a member of the faculty since 1992, served as Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Hunter for five years. He has also made outstanding contributions and service to many College programs, including efforts to recruit and support minority students.

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Social Work’s Abramovitz Named Educator of the Year

 

Social Work School Professor Mimi Abramovitz has been named “Educator of the Year” (2006) by the NYS Social Work Education Association.  This honor was conferred upon Abramovitz for her significant contributions to the field of social work and for her outstanding leadership on behalf of the social work education community.

 

“I am deeply honored and flattered to have been recognized by my colleagues for my work as an educator, scholar, and activist,” said Abramovitz.

 

The award was presented at a conference, themed “The Battle for Human Rights: Social Work in the Trenches,” in which Abramovitz delivered the keynote address on “The Welfare State: A Battlefield for Human Rights.”

 

Abramovitz, who has been teaching at the School of Social Work for 25 years, is committed to achieving social justice by undoing racism, promoting community well-being, and advancing social welfare policy that addresses the needs of low-income women.  The work she has done as an educator means a great deal to her, and this honor is one she is particularly proud to receive.

 

“It is an especially great privilege to teach at the Hunter School of Social Work where support for [my] goals by the administration, faculty, staff, and students has contributed to the award I received.  I am especially proud to be part of a team that educates the future social workers of New York City.”

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Sewing Women: Immigrants and the New York City Garment Industry, by Margaret M. Chin (Sociology), has received the honorable mention book award from the International Migration Section of the American Sociological Association.  The book also received an award from the Chinese Chapter of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, which cited Chin for “academic research that promotes increased understanding of the lives of working people.”  Published by the Columbia University Press, the book is based on extensive interviews with workers and employers in the New York garment industry and also explores how immigration status, family circumstances, ethnic relations, and gender affect the industry’s workplaces.

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Professor Roy DeCarava Honored at White House

Hunter College’s Roy DeCarava was awarded the prestigious 2006 National Medal of Arts by President Bush at the White House on November 9.  DeCarava, a Distinguished Professor of Art at Hunter, has devoted more than 60 years to an extraordinary career as a master photographer and a pioneer in the art of photography.

During a presentation ceremony in the Oval Office with the President and First Lady Laura Bush, DeCarava — a member of the Hunter faculty since 1975 — was hailed for a lifetime of inspiring contributions to the arts.  “In the midst of the Civil Rights movement, his revealing work seized the attention of our nation while displaying the dignity and determination of his subjects,” DeCarava’s citation read.

Living and working primarily in New York City, DeCarava has been widely praised as the first photographer “to devote serious attention…to the black experience in America” and for the affection for the people and places of his hometown of New York which are so evident in his work.

DeCarava has been the subject of 15 solo exhibitions.  His work is in collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.  He was also the first African American photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The Medal of Arts is awarded each year by the National Endowment for the Arts to recognize individuals for their excellence and contributions to the arts in America.

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Two Hunter faculty members were featured speakers at the 25th annual COR Education and Training Colloquium held November 1-5 in Washington.  Vanya Quinones-Jenab (Psychology) spoke on “Why Sex Matters for Neuroscience,” and Jacqueline Nassy Brown (Anthropology) gave the banquet keynote address, on “Why I Love My Job in Research.”  The COR (Career Opportunities in Research) Program, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Mental Health, is a grant program that provides support for highly qualified minority students seeking careers in mental-health related sciences.  

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Mimi Abramovitz (Social Work) recently spoke on several aspects of welfare reform at the social work schools of three universities in Toronto—Ryerson University, York University, and McMaster University—and she also wrote on the subject for Critical Social Policy, a British journal.  In addition, in October Abramovitz spoke on “The New Underclass” at the University of Bielefeld in Germany.

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“Quantum voting and privacy protection: First Steps,” an article by Mark Hillery (Physics), appears in SPIE Newsroom, an online publication of SPIE, the professional organization for optical engineering. As Hillery explains, since the discovery of quantum mechanics over a century ago, “it has mainly been used to describe the behavior of atomic and subatomic systems. In the 1980s, however, a few visionaries began to think about using quantum mechanical systems to process and store information. The results have been spectacular.” The new SPIE newsroom article shows how quantum mechanics can be used to keep secret ballots secret.

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A presentation co-authored by Susana Palamarczuk (Geology and Geography) is on the agenda of the Geological Society of America’s Annual Meeting, which will be held in Philadelphia October 22-25. Palamarczuk will be the presenter of the paper, which deals with an area in Argentina that contains a record of a major event that occurred 65 million years ago—“the mass extinction,” explains Palamarczuk, “of many marine and terrestrial organisms, including the dinosaurs.”  The presentation seeks to relate observations of microfossils, vegetation changes, and geochemical analyses to the most prominent theory about the cause of the mass extinction: the impact of a meteorite.

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Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality, a new book by Stuart Ewen (Film and Media Studies) and Elizabeth Ewen, examines the development of racial and other stereotypes over the past two centuries and the ways in which science, modern media, and other powerful forces have promoted what the publisher, Seven Stories Press, calls “myths of innate difference.”  Among the authors who have praised Typecasting, Barbara Ehrenreich calls it “a profound and sweeping study of the most everyday, often unconscious, forms of prejudice,” and Deborah Willis lauds its “exceptional and profound research on visual culture.”

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Faculty in Mathematics and Statistics are making their mark far and wide.  Barry Cherkas, for the second consecutive year, was co-principal investigator for a math-science partnership grant between Hunter and Region 4 of the U. S. Department of Education.  Dana Draghicescu received an American Statistical Association New Investigator Award to support her participation in the 2006 ASA Conference on Radiation and Health, held last June in Monterey, where she presented a poster.  Makram Talih has been awarded a New Researchers Fellowship by the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute.  As part of the fellowship, he will take part in the Program on High Dimensional Inference and Random Matrices being held this fall at Research Triangle Park, NC.

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Karen Kern (History) will be giving a paper on "Ottoman Women, the Constuction of the Nation, and the Limits of Citizenship" at the University of Tampere, Finland, in October 2006. The conference, titled "Suffrage, Gender and Citizenship, International Perspectives on Parliamentary Reforms," celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first nations (Australia, New Zealand, Finland and Norway) to give women the right to vote.

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Nicholas Freudenberg (Urban Public Health) is the lead editor of Cities and the Health of the Public, published this summer by Vanderbilt University Press The book analyzes the relationship between urban living conditions and public health, examining such factors as population characteristics, social and physical environments, and health care and social service systems. The publishers stress the importance of understanding “the effects of urban expansion” on public health because, they point out, “city dwellers will account for three-quarters of the world’s population by 2030.”

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Aided by a Hunter College Teaching and Learning with Technology grant, Daniel Chess (Mathematics and Statistics) has developed an online mathematics calculator that can perform a host of operations such as dividing polynomials, plotting a function, and solving an algebraic equation, among others. The calculator was developed by using the application webMathematica, which adds interactive calculations and visualization to a Web site by integrating the software Mathematica with the latest Web server technology. The new online calculator is at http://www.danchess.com/wm/calculator/.

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Joan C. Tronto (Political Science) has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to lecture at a research center in jurisprudence at the University of Bologna. While at the center—the Centro di Ricerca in Storio del Diritto, Filosofia e Sociologia del Diritto e Informatica Giuridica—Tronto will serve as a senior lecturer, discussing women and gender in legal and political thought and the ethic of care in contemporary feminist theory. The award runs from February-June 2007.  In addition, during the summer Tronto was the Maria Goeppert Mayer Guest Professor at Georg August University in Goettingen, Germany. Named for Nobel laureate Maria Goeppert Mayer, who studied physics in Goettingen, the program brings international scholars in women’s and gender studies to area universities.

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Faculty News Summer 2006:

The Social Science Research Council has selected Marianna Pavlovskaya (Geography) to receive a teaching fellowship that will provide support for her course project titled “After the Future: Geography of Post-Socialist Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.” The goal of Pavlovskaya’s project is to develop materials for proposed graduate and undergraduate geography courses on Russia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus—to develop comprehensive readers on the area; design Geographic Information System-based exercises; and create a course Web page that includes links to high-quality Internet resources. “These materials,” explains Pavlovskaya, “will help to teach the emerging political, ethnic, and economic geographies of post-socialist Eurasia in new ways.”

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The Carolyn Payton Early Career Award, which recognizes the achievement of a black woman in the early stages of her career, will be presented to Tamara Buckley (Educational Foundations and Counseling Programs) at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association to be held in August. Buckley was nominated for the award by the editor of the journal Sex Roles based on Buckley’s recent article in the journal, “Black adolescent girls: Do gender role and racial identity impact their self-esteem?”

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The U.S. Embassy in Moscow was the scene of a June 20 discussion forum titled “Truth Happens: Influencing Opinions and Events” featuring Stuart Ewen (Film and Media Studies).  Ewen was in Russia this summer as a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

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Facilitating permanency for older adolescents in foster care: Toolbox for youth permanency by Gerald P. Mallon (Social Work) is heavily cited in a recent report to Congress from the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, “A Report to Congress on Adoption and Other Permanency Outcomes for Children in Foster Care: Focus on Older Children.” In addition, a letter from Mallon appears in a recent edition of the Belfast Telegraph of Northern Ireland. Commenting on the recent announcement that gay and lesbian couples will be able to adopt children in Northern Ireland, Mallon writes, “Putting children’s needs at the heart of the process…is a positive step in the right direction for children in need of loving, caring, and permanent homes."

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Ellen Trief (Special Education) is an associate editor of the Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, which was recently presented with one of the most prestigious awards in its field “for 100 years of outstanding contributions to the literature of the blindness field.” The award, the Bledsoe Award of the Association for Education and Rehabilitation of the Blind and Visually Impaired (AER), was presented at the AER’s international conference, held in Utah in mid-July.

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Christopher Stone (Classical and Oriental Studies) and the students in his Arab Novel in Translation class played hosts last spring to novelist Alaa El Aswani, author of the blockbuster best-seller from Egypt, The Yacoubian Building. While the class was studying El Aswani’s book, several of the students—at Stone’s urging—went to the Tribeca Film Festival, where the film based on the book was having its U.S, premiere, and succeeded in meeting El Aswani and telling him about their course. At the students’ invitation, the author went to the next class, where, says Stone, he “spoke to the class and took questions for a full 75 minutes even though he was being picked up for the airport just two hours after class ended. After class he patiently stayed, signing students’ books and posing for photos.”

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Great Food, Great Sex is the appetizing promise of a new book of the same title, co-authored by Robert Fried (Psychology) and published by Ballentine. Based on nutritional and medical research, the book enhances sexual performance vitality by promoting cardiovascular and heart health. The book is based on the specific science of the cardiovascular biology of food-derived nitric oxide that won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Medicine for three American scientists and led directly to the development of Viagra. The book has been featured on NPR, PBS, and WNBC and in The New York Post, Women’s Health, Glamour, Redbook, and several other magazines.

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Two Hunter Chemistry professors, Spiro Alexandratos and Lynn Francesconi, have been selected to participate in a workshop on nuclear energy sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences. The workshop, on “Basic Research Needs for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems,” will be held in Washington in August. The panelists will seek to identify research needs and opportunities in advanced nuclear energy systems and related areas, focusing on new, emerging, and scientifically challenging areas that have the potential to have significant impact in science and technologies.

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Faculty News Spring 2006:

Anna Tomasino (English) was the subject of a three part series television interview entitled "Music and the Mind" for the award winning television program "The Thinking Mind" on Time Warner Cable (Brooklyn) and CTV (Staten Island) in June 2006. She promoted her new book Discovering Popular Culture (Longman 2007; Pub Date May 29, 2006) and her last book Music and Culture (Longman 2005). The series focused on music and culture: Part I "Music and History," Part II, "Music and the Mind," and Part III, "Music and Healing."

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Neepa Maitra (Physics and Astronomy) recently received a $536,584 CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation’s Early Career Development Program, one of the most prestigious awards granted by the NSF. Maitra’s research focuses on time-dependent density functional theory, a method to describe electron interactions, dynamics, and excitations—the movements of electrons to a higher energy state. The theory holds promise for the study of biomolecular systems such as photosynthetic processes or the study of ultraviolet radiation damage in DNA since these systems are too large for other quantum mechanical methods. Says Maitra, “There are some known problems with commonly used methods of studying these areas, and much of my research deals with identifying these problems and trying to fix them.”

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At a lively words-and-music event held at the CUNY Graduate Center on April 26, featured speaker Sarah Chinn (English) provided the focus of the evening in her lecture “‘Youth Demands Amusement’: Dancing, Dancehalls, and the Exercise of Adolescent Freedom.” Audience members were invited to dance before and after the lecture to period recordings of ragtime and pop songs. In her talk, based on a book she is completing, Chinn noted that what we now understand as adolescent identity is “a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, brought into being in large cities by the children of new immigrants” who became conscious of themselves “as comprising an age cohort.”

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Manu Bhagavan (History) has been awarded a 2006 American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, one of the most prestigious and competitive prizes in the humanities. Bhagavan’s $30,000 award will enable him to spend next year working on his new book, an intellectual history of India in the years after it gained its independence in 1947. Bhagavan, who has won several other research awards, is the author of Sovereign Spheres: Princes, Education, and Empire in Colonial India (Oxford University Press, 2003) as well as articles, book chapters, and book reviews on contemporary and historical India, Asian studies, and American education.

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The Italian edition of Vertigo, the acclaimed memoir by Louise DeSalvo (English), will be released this spring by Nutrimenti, a major publishing house based in Rome. The memoir was originally published in the United States in 1996. Also, DeSalvo’s essay “Color/White; Complexion/Dark,” about the racialization of Italian-Americans, appears in another book soon to be published in Italy, Gli italiani sono bianchi? The collection was first published in the United States in 2003 as Are Italians White? “These publications,” comments DeSalvo, “both mark a new trend in Italian publishing: an interest in the work of Italian-American writers.”

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Steve Greenbaum (Physics) has received a $250,000 instrument grant from the Office of Naval Research to purchase a solid state nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer. The new instrument will forward Greenbaum’s research aimed at evaluating new materials for energy storage devices including lithium batteries, fuel cells, and supercapacitors, which are devices that can store a great amount of electric charge and deliver their charge very rapidly. The award Greenbaum obtained was given under a highly competitive program, the Defense University Research Instrumentation Program, which helps academic institutions purchase state-of-the-art research equipment.

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At a conference on teaching the Holocaust to be held in June at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Carol Weir (English) will present a paper on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel MAUS. Her paper, “MAUS Jumps off the Page (Teaching the Holocaust as a Visual Text in a Multicultural Urban College Classroom),” stems from her experiences teaching a Hunter course on Jewish-American literature, where, she notes, the Holocaust is examined through many works, but “the visual images of Spiegelman’s comic book text resonate more powerfully than text-only survivor narratives.”

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Stuart Ewen (Film and Media Studies) has received a Fulbright Senior Specialists Grant to teach at two universities in Russia this summer. At St. Petersburg State University, where he will be the lead instructor in the university’s annual Fulbright summer school, he will teach a seminar for graduate students and faculty on “Consumption as a Way of Life.” At Moscow State University he will conduct a workshop in coordination with the Russian-language publication of his book PR! A Social History of Spin. The book is to be published by Gazeta Publishing in May.

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In her forthcoming book The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative, Deborah Lutz (English) argues that the character of the “dangerous lover” has had a powerful influence not only in literature but also in the history of ideas. Lutz’s study, published by the Ohio State University Press, examines works by such thinkers and authors as Heidegger, Barthes, Byron, Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde as well as non-canonical works such as contemporary romances.

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Ivone Margulies (Film and Media Studies) received a Mellon Fellowship for a full-year residency at the Graduate Center, Center for the Humanities to participate in an interdisciplinary seminar on the theme of the “aftermath.” She will be working on the testimonial aspects of reenactment films, part of her book-length study on theatricality in film.

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A new book by Robert Perinbanayagam (Sociology) explores the social and psychological processes involved in the playing of games. Titled Games and Sport in Everyday Life: Dialogues and Narratives of the Self, the book will be published this month by Paradigm Publishers.

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An in-depth article on a series of drawings by Anthony Panzera (Art) is featured in the Fall 2005 issue of the magazine American Artist. Titled “1,001 Body Parts: Anthony Panzera and the Fine Art of Selectivity,” the article includes reproductions of nearly 30 of Panzera’s works, small chalk drawings of what the article calls “isolated fragments of the body.” Noting that Panzera has been developing the series over the course of 30 years, the essay says that “These body parts are both elegant and eloquent. They are filled with sensuality and grace, and when viewed together as a group, make a grand statement concerning the beauty of the body and the nature of selectivity in drawing.”

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Margaret Crahan (History) was a member of a 30-person delegation that traveled to Chile to witness the March 11 inauguration of Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s first woman president. Sponsored by the White House Project, an organization that seeks to help women move into the leadership pipeline, the delegation gathered information on strategies that can propel a woman into a leadership post and will share its findings with U.S. policymakers, media, and the public. Crahan is the Dorothy Epstein Professor of Latin American History at Hunter.

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Faculty News Winter 2006:

“What do we really know about Black sexuality in the United States? Further, what has to be done so we can learn more?” This is the central question underlying a new project, headed by Juan Battle (Sociology) that recently received a two-year $345,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.