Faculty Notes — Spring 2023

Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Physics, 1964 to 2005
Tom Greenslade turned 85 two days before Christmas, but age has not kept him from writing more articles for the physics teaching journals. In the middle of February, he decided to count some of them and discovered he had five articles accepted for publication this spring. There were seven more submitted but not yet fully accepted. A recently published article was about the calculating devices in the museum housed in a wing of this house in Gambier. The oldest is a huge form of slide rule dating back to the 1870s. The smallest is a tiny slide rule used by his father, a chemistry major at Kenyon College who graduated in 1931. [His great uncle was an 1876 graduate and Tom was awarded a D.Sc. in 2002 when he retired from full-time teaching.] The biggest one is a 24 inch long slide rule that was given to him several years ago when he and Sonia spent several days at Amherst College identifying early apparatus in the Amherst collection. He may have used this in an optics laboratory in his junior year. At the present time he is working on a lengthy article about the Electricity & Magnetism Laboratory that all physics majors took; he has examples of all of the apparatus for this lab in his Collection, which now has about 800 items. A recent addition was a long loop-the-loop demonstration that dates from 1875, when it cost $7.50. Most visitors of the Collection gravitate toward it!

Clifford Weber, Professor Emeritus of Classics, 1969 to 2008
Cliff Weber and Robert Stoddart '73 have collaborated on a contribution of Latin and English verse to the journal Arion. Dating to his first year at Kenyon, Robert's response in rhyming English to Cliff's Latin elegiacs was written so long ago that he initially could not recall having written it. "It's too good [to be mine]," he wrote to Cliff, denying authorship. Robert's droll couplets, though full of innuendo, sanitize Cliff's blunt Latin, which aims to shock even more than Ovid does in his erotic verse.

Peter Rutkoff, Professor Emeritus of American Studies, 1971 to 2022
I'm still engaged in several arenas, especially in assisting my wife in creating a project in Ghana where we will bring American teachers to several small rural schools there to give workshops on project-based and experiential learning. But to accomplish this we are trying to establish internet connectivity in a provincial district where none yet exists. It's quite a challenge and I welcome all forms of support.

Barry Gunderson, Professor of Art Emeritus, 1974 to 2015
I have retired from the classroom but not from my sculpture studio. Most every day I am in the studio in the green barn at the corner of Duff Street and Highway 229. I am always making sculptures and exhibiting whenever possible. This Fall I had a piece juried into the International Exhibit at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin – an art museum that exhibits only artwork that deals with birds. Birds have been a focus of my work during the years of the pandemic as birds continued to visit me when friends and even family could not do so. Currently I have a recent sculpture in the annual Bryn Du Art Show in Granville, Ohio. This exhibit is a national juried exhibition. I also have new sculptures on exhibit at the Art Access Gallery in Bexley, Ohio. Other new sculptures can be viewed on my website: barrygunderson.com.

Royal Rhodes, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, 1979 to 2018
I continue to write and publish poetry. My art and poetry collaboration with Claudia Esslinger was exhibited at Fairfield University, and now at a meditation center in Madison, CT. On March 30 I'll moderate a presentation by Greg Melville '92, who will talk about his latest book: Over My Dead Body, an engaging survey of cemeteries across America. It was very favorably reviewed in the New York Times by the daughter of Caroline Kennedy. Greg's earlier book, Greasy Rider, which tells about his road trip across America using French-fry oil for his diesel, is a rollicking narrative. Both are in the "Must Read" category.

Edward Schortman, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, 1981 to 2021
Pat Urban and I were back in Honduras during May-June, 2022, continuing the archaeological work we conducted with students there beginning in 1983. Supported by a generous gift from an alum, we were conducting excavations and analyzing artifacts as we tried to figure out how and where pottery vessels were manufactured in three neighboring valleys from 600-1000 AD and in what ways the exchange of these containers bound the area's ancient populations together. It's a knotty problem that only gets more complex the more we examine it. This proves the old archaeological maxim that, the more you dig, the less you know for sure.

We are close to finishing the digitization, and uploading to Digital Kenyon, of all archaeological records generated by students and staff on the Kenyon-Honduras Project. Thanks to Kenyon's support and the work of a great many people, here and in Honduras, the Kenyon-Honduras Archive will provide students and professionals with basic data about long-forgotten ancient lives that they can ponder. The archive and the work that created it is helping to bring back past people whose names are no longer remembered into the conversation about what it means to be human. Amara Allen '23, a senior, is working with me on a study of ancient religious practices, drawing on the archive's records. Her project will result in a set of instructional materials that can be used to teach the area's prehistory in local Honduran schools.

Joseph Adler, Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and Religious Studies, 1987 to 2014
In 2022 I published The Yijing: A Guide (Oxford University Press), an introduction for general readers, practitioners of divination, students and scholars. Here is the link: global.oup.com/academic/product/the-yijing-a-guide-9780190072469

Wendy Singer, Associate Provost and Roy T. Wortman Distinguished Professor of History, 1988 to present
This year 2022-2023, I have served as associate provost and had the wonderful opportunity to see the college from a wider lens, reinforcing my deep respect for colleagues across all divisions, who bring innovation, creativity, and deep commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship.

In December 2022, I joined with four other faculty — Chris Gillen, Paula Turner, Karen Hicks and David Lynn '76 — in teaching a technical writing workshop in Chennai, India, where we collaborated with some of the world's top engineers to advance scientific writing for the next generation of students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

Also this year, I have been working with a consortium of 13 universities across Asia and Africa to advance teaching and research in the Humanities. This group — Humanities across Borders — is committed to rethinking our approach to higher education so that we can bring all forms of knowledge, including from local artisans and community leaders, into the college environment.

Next year, I look forward to returning to my own research (on Sabbatical), an ongoing book project on the history of India's democratic institutions, called: A Seat at the Table.

Jianhua Bai, Robert A. Oden Jr. Professor of Chinese, 1991 to present
Jianhua Bai was awarded the 2022 CLTA (Chinese Language Teachers Association) Outstanding Contribution Award.

Clara Román-Odio,Professor Emerita of Spanish, 1992 to 2021
If I had to use one word to describe the past year, it would be “memorable.” 

Professionally, my recent book, Mujeres espiritistas en Puerto Rico (1880-1920), was nominated for and received two important awards in Puerto Rico: the PEN International of Puerto Rico Award in the Category of Essay (2022) and the Instituto de Literatura Puertorriqueña, National Award in the Category of Scholarship and Criticism (2023).  Additionally, an excerpt of the work was featured as an article in the journal of the State Office for Historical Preservation of Puerto Rico. These distinctions give the research a recognition that meaningfully enhances its ability to fulfill the main goal I set for the project: to make visible the important work of Puerto Rican spiritist women writers and social activists at the turn of the 19th century, which the prevailing historical record has largely ignored. Looking ahead, I also will be presenting the work as a Keynote Lecture for Women’s History Month at St. John’s University, Queens, NY and will lead, at the same institution, a faculty workshop on digital collections as a framework for the public intellectual.

At the personal level, things have been interesting. I sustained a major fracture to my right leg that caused me to greatly curtail most physical activities and enforced several months of quietude, to say the least. This time has been valuable in terms of personal introspection and growth. While I would rather not have gone through it, I have also come to greatly value the lessons of patience, resilience and gratefulness for the unconditional support of my loving family, which have been integral to the healing process. Presently, I am almost back to 100% and eager to resume bike trips, hikes and travel with my husband, which were so brusquely interrupted by this household accident. Spring brings hope and a bright outlook to resume retirement adventures in the months ahead!

Sarah Blick, Professor of Art History, 1994 to present
I am hoping to finish my book manuscript on late-medieval English baptismal font covers this year when my cats, Ufford and Chufford stop lying on top of my keyboard. In the meantime, my essay, Hidden in Plain Sight: Complex Iconography and the Survival of Late-Medieval English Font Covers will appear in Reconstructing the Font Canopy at St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich: Historical, Material, and Digital Studies of a Late Medieval Masterpiece, (eds.) Amy Gillette and Zachary Stewart (Brill Press, forthcoming 2023).

My editing continues apace as the scholarly journal I edit, Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art & Architecture peregrinations.kenyon.edu is now 21 years old and the book series I co-edit Art & Material Culture of Medieval and Renaissance Europe for Brill Press in Leiden has now published 19 volumes, with more scheduled to appear in the next year.

Marcella Hackbardt, Professor of Art, 2000 to present
I have been busy exhibiting photographic works from two different series, “My Rooms" and "Momentos." Since summer 2022, my work was included in exhibitions at the Intersect Arts Center in Saint Louis, the Indiana University Kokomo, Iris Gallery in Cincinnati, the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio, the Midwest Center for Photography in Kansas, the Escondido Arts Center, and the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. I am currently included in the exhibition "Rinse & Repeat" at Girl’s Club Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and in "Flow" at the Shot Tower Gallery in Columbus, Ohio.

Katherine Elkins, Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities, 2002 to present
Jon Chun and I began working with our Kenyon students on GPT-2, an earlier model of ChatGPT, in 2019, so it's been a wild ride to see the media frenzy with the release of Chat! One of the cool things about working in this space has been the ability to conduct original research alongside our students (check out our first essay on it, called Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics). We've also been working with students on surfacing the emotional arc of stories and I discuss much of that research in a book that came out with Cambridge UP last summer: The Shapes of Stories! And for anyone who decided to spend part of the pandemic reading one of the longest novels in the world (Proust's In Search of Lost Time), my edited collection with OUP is out. It brings together both philosophers and literary scholars to discuss music, art, love, jealousy and more. It all started with a seminar on Proust at Kenyon!

Nuh Aydin, Professor of Mathematics, 2002 to present
Professor Aydin is wrapping up his Fulbright visit to Algeria which has been full of surprises and new connections. His final few weeks will be very intense.

Paul Gebhardt, Associate Professor of German, 2002 to present
I am completing my 21st year teaching at Kenyon College. My colleague Leo Riegert and I are looking back on quite a bit of success — one element being at least 15 students who received Fulbright Fellowships to Germany between 2009 and now. Currently an additional German major is a semi-finalist in the 2023-24 competition. In the past year I have continued to pursue one of my greatest passions: travel. A trip to Germany stands out during Winter Break when I explored the German cities of Frankfurt (a highlight being looking at the Marc Chagall retrospective at the Schirn Gallery) and Münster (Westphalia). In January 2023, I also traveled to Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, Mexico for the first time. In the area of scholarship, I am happy to note that I will be presenting at the Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Conference in Lexington, KY in April 2023. My talk will focus on a public television documentary which makes an attempt to revisit the discussion patterns in regards to the issues surrounding the 2022 documenta exhibit. Furthermore, essays on novels by Martin Walser and Jochen Schmidt are in the making. 

Yutan Getzler, Professor of Chemistry, 2004 to present
I continue to be thrilled with how eager students are to collaborate on research projects and with how much interest there is in the work we are doing. In the last year I was invited to speak about polymers and sustainability at Case Western Reserve's Macromolecular Science & Engineering department and as part of a major symposium at the ACS National meeting in Chicago. I was also honored to be invited to submit an article to Accounts of Chemical Research, which I co authored with longtime friend and collaborator Robert Mathers (DOI: 10.1021/acs.accounts.2c00194).

A project initiated by Shannon Wright (BCHM & NEUR '16) was finally published in Green Chemistry Reviews and Letters (DOI: 10.1080/17518253.2022.2127333) due to the persistent work of more recent lab members Aidan Clarkson (CHEM '22), Jenna Korns (CHEM '19), Ellie Haljun (CHEM '23), Lila Lofving (CHEM '24) and Meheret Ourgessa (BCHM '23).

Finally, I am enormously excited that the department will be hiring a ninth tenure track faculty member — please let everyone know so we can get another awesome colleague!

Ross Feller, James D. & Cornelia W. Ireland Associate Professor of Music, 2011 to present
Back in 2020, Cheer-Accident, the Chicago-based band I play with, had been invited to play the well-known Big Ears Festival festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. Just days before this was to take place, it was announced that the festival had been canceled. Now that music venues have opened back up again, I have performed in several midwest, east coast and southern Cheer-Accident tours, which included numerous performances of my composition “Foils.” One of the highlights was our performance at the annual ProgDay Festival in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I am excited to once again play live concerts and record with a band whose artistic vision I deeply respect. Throughout the pandemic and post-pandemic years I’ve continued to collaborate with choreographer Kora Radella. Our recent work has been shown in Mexico City at the FIDCDMX Festival Internacional De Danza Contemporanea, in Geneva, New York at the Somatic Dance Conference and Performance Festival, in Cleveland at the Ohio Dance Festival and at Kenyon. Kora and I have also collaborated on four dance and music videos that have involved colleagues and students. My composition “Confabulation” for SATB saxophone quartet was performed virtually at the annual Ball State University New Music Festival. This work was composed in memory of my father who passed away in 2020. I’ve also released, and have performed on, three Bandcamp albums, including one with my NYC-based trio Mantis. Here at Kenyon, I am thrilled to play baritone saxophone in the Kenyon College Jazz Ensemble, in concerts on campus, and on our upcoming tour to New Orleans. I have also recorded a trio album with fellow saxophonist Jeff Hollie and guitarist Andrew Clarkson, to be released on Bandcamp later this year. At the beginning of the semester we hosted percussionist-performers Allen Otte and John Lane for a highly successful performance and workshop of The Innocents, their hour-long dramatic soundscape about social justice, wrongful imprisonment, and exoneration. Finally, I continue to publish and edit reviews in the Computer Music Journal, about current work in the field of computer music, published by The MIT Press.

Nancy Powers, Assoc Dir of the Center for the Study of American Democracy and Assistant Professor of Political Science, 2011 to present
I enjoy splitting my time between teaching comparative politics and the work of the Center for the Study of American Democracy and I get to do it from the beautiful new Oden Hall academic building, where my office yields a bird's eye view of the comings and goings between Peirce and Rosse. A few years ago, I moved to Gambier, where I enjoy being able to walk to work, friends' homes, a Kenyon athletic event or the Kokosing trail. I love visits from former students, so look me up when you come back to visit.

Jacqueline McAllister, Associate Professor of Political Science, 2014 to present
The Council on Foreign Relations recently awarded me an International Affairs Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars, which I will use for my upcoming sabbatical. As part of this fellowship, I will work at the U.S. Department of State, Office of Global Criminal Justice.  My family and I look forward to connecting with former students in Washington, D.C. in the coming academic year!

Joy Brennan, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, 2014 to present
I became a tenured faculty member this past July. This year I am on a research leave sponsored by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, which supports Buddhist studies scholars in our writing, and next year will be my first sabbatical. I am fortunate and grateful to have these two years in a row to dedicate to my thinking and writing. I am currently working on two articles and a longer term book project. Writing alternates between despair-inducingly difficult and very rewarding. I am appreciating the Kenyon community in a new way, as I have participated in some events from the leisurely position of being on leave from teaching and advising. This past fall, I audited much of the third year Chinese course taught by the generous Professor Chengjuan Sun, which was a wonderful chance to renew my reading, listening and speaking skills in modern Chinese, and to be with some students (whom I miss!). My daughter is a kindergartner at Wiggin Street Elementary. She has not met a social context that she does not adore, so she is enjoying school very much, which makes me happy. She and I now live in Gambier with my partner Sarah Murnen of the Psychology Department. Having moved from Mount Vernon this past August, I can attest that the stars are much keener in Gambier than in Mount Vernon, which is lovely. 

Tomás Gallareta Cervera, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Latino/a Studies, 2016 to present
This semester is particular. Professor Claire Novotny, Oscar (our son), and I took ten students to Yucatán as part of the travel component of my Latin American Ethnicity, Identity, and Culture class.  This is the first class I know that takes students on a seven-day international visit to important heritage sites and landscapes integral to understanding colonization and Mestizaje in Latin America. All students are intelligent, outgoing, and have a keen eye for anthropology observations (and I am not saying that lightly!). Moreover, Professor Novotny and I are teaching a Methods in Anthropology class that involves an archaeological excavation here at Kenyon College.

Alex Novikoff, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, 2017 to present
Prof. Novikoff led his summer class, "Italy from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance" in partnership with Franklin University Switzerland and on location in northern Italy in July 2022, the first time the class has run since COVID-19. Eight Kenyon and Denison students took the class for credit and plans are now underway for the summer 2023 session. Prof. Novikoff has also remained busy on the speaking circuit. In August he delivered the opening lecture at a conference on medieval Jewish-Christian relations at the University of Bern, Switzerland; in January he returned to the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem to speak at a reunion conference for a research group studying the Impact and Reception of Aristotelian Logic in Medieval Philosophy; and in March he delivered a lecture on the legacy of the Crusades at the CRF Museum in Loudonville, OH.

Patricia Yu, Assistant Professor of Art History, 2021 to present
I joined the Kenyon faculty right when the campus returned to fully in-person classes. I am grateful to all the members of the community who have welcomed me after my cross-country move from California to central Ohio. A huge thank you to my students for being my curricular guinea pigs as I develop new classes in art history (Art and Architecture of Japan, Asian Art in Cross-cultural Translation, The Themed Landscape, Art of Late Imperial China, and Art and Propaganda in Modern Asia).