Kate Sutter ’20, Instructor and Art Department Technician, will be participating in several upcoming exhibitions:
- Form + Space, an International Sculptural Juried Exhibition hosted by the Museum of Art—DeLand
- DeLand, FL
- October 6 – December 29
- GROUNDED, Creative foundations in contemporary sculpture, Martha Gault Art Gallery
- Slippery Rock, PA
- Closing reception, October 3
- Mugshot: Artistic Drinking Vessels on view at the Arvada Arts Center
- Arvada, Colorado
- September 12-November 10
Difei Chen ’25, attended PIKSI-Boston, an undergraduate summer diversity institute in philosophy held annually at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It aims to create an inclusive environment for underrepresented students to engage in philosophical study. The program’s mentors provided valuable guidance on their graduate program applications, and were inspired to begin their research on whether echo chambers diminish our capacity to make rational judgments.
Guo Wu, Associate Professor of History, presented a paper on pedagogy titled “Listening to the Voices from China: A Non-“Western-Centered” Pedagogical Approach” to the New York Conference on Asian Studies (NYCAS) in Buffalo, NY on September 28, 2024.
He presented a research paper of religious studies, “Monks and Nuns in Early Medieval Chinese Hagiography: Revisiting the Biographical Writing of Monk Historians Baochang and Huijiao in the Liang Dynasty (502-557),” to the 66th American Association for Chinese Studies in Las Vegas on October 6.
Wu was invited to serve as co-discussant for the panel “Historiography, (Auto)biography, and Hagiography in Ancient China.”
He was interviewed by Colum Murphy from Bloomberg for his opinion on the Chinese suspension of international adoption and was quoted in Murphy’s report titled, “China Brings Heartbreak to US Families With Foreign Adoption Ban.”
Judson Herrman, Frank T. McClure Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History, is among eighteen contributors who have completed a major update to a ground-breaking 1981 study of Athenian democratic commemorations of the war-dead as the defining element in the the state’s collective identity.
Their volume, The Athenian Funeral Oration After Nicole Loraux, has been published by Cambridge University Press and has been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement.
The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project is the largest and most comprehensive effort to quantify health status across places and over time so that health systems can be improved and health disparities can be eliminated.
On October 3, 2025, Caryl Waggett, Professor of Global Health Studies, co-hosted a 3-hr workshop as part of the Consortium of Universities for Global Health Virtual Global Health Week, along with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which coordinates the GBD, Teach Global Health, and the Global Health Educators Community, for nearly 600 participants.
The workshop introduced key GBD terminology, methods, and results; demonstrated GBD Compare tool and other web-based data visualizations (healthdata.org); and discussed strategies for teaching students how to use GBD tools to analyze, compare, and interpret health data from every state in the US and every country in the world.
Nickel Spartz ’26
Writing consultant, Nickel Spartz ’26, presented an update on their research project titled “The Effect of Creative Prompts on Students’ Critical Thinking and Satisfaction” at the 2024 Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies, held September 27-29 at the York College Center for Community Engagement.
Alexis Hart, Professor of English and Director of Writing, served as a faculty research mentor at the workshop and presented a brief reflection on the 10th anniversary of Naylor at the opening plenary session.
Olivia Kraus ’24, Katherine Elmquist ’26, Maria Lounder ’26, Braislee Byrne ’25, and Athena Drollas ’26 were accompanied by Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Rod Clark, as they presented their work “Some Effects of Acute and Sub-Chronic Glyphosate on Schedule-Controlled Responding in the Rat.”
The poster was presented at the 50th annual conference of the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) in Philadelphia in May.
Braislee Byrne ’25, Maris Lounder ’26, Olivia Kraus ’24, and Madison Lamanski ’26 were accompanied by Rod Clark, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, as they presented their poster, “Acquisition of IRT>t Schedule-Controlled Responding in Rats: A Comparison of the VPA Autism Model Rats and Neuro-typical Developing Rats.”
The poster was presented at the 46th Annual Conference of the Society for the Quantitative Analysis of Behavior (SQAB) held in Philadelphia in May.
John MacNeill Miller, Associate Professor of English, published a book, The Ecological Plot: How Stories Gave Rise to a Science, with the University of Virginia Press. The book traces the shared histories of ecology, economics, and realist fiction, showing how each field came to depend on the power of storytelling to explore the ways communities are materially bound together.
The book also explores why these once closely aligned fields eventually broke apart into distinct and sometimes incompatible disciplines, arguing for the importance of bringing them back into conversation to solve the urgent environmental problems of the present.
Miller gave an online talk in September about the book through the Greenhouse Environmental Humanities series hosted by the University of Stavanger in Norway, which can be viewed here.
The Ecological Plot was favorably reviewed on October 9 in the Washington Post by the novelist Lydia Millet.
One essay adapted from the book, The Forgotten Female Novelist Who Foresaw Ecology, Environmentalism, and Realist Fiction, appeared in September at the culture site Literary Hub. Another essay adapted from the book, Darwin the Storyteller, was recently published at the environmental news site The Revelator.
Planetary Health Alliance
In collaboration with the Consortium of Universities for Global Health, the Planetary Health Alliance, the Global Health Educators Community, and Teach Global Health, Caryl Waggett, Professor of Global Health, is pleased to have co-first authored the Planetary Health Learning Objectives (PHLOs, pronounced flows) in the September 4 volume of The Lancet Planetary Health. The paper is available open access here.
Planetary Health is an emerging inter-professional and interdisciplinary field focused on analyzing and addressing the impacts of destabilized natural systems on health and wellbeing.
The goal of the paper is to help educators teach students essential content causes and strategies to address climate change, the 6th mass extinction of life on earth, global scale persistent pollutants in air, water, and soils; degradation of of marine ecosystems; shortages of fresh water and arable land; and pervasive changes in land use and cover.
Barbara Riess, Professor of Spanish, published Briefcases from Caracas, a translation of Los maletines (Siruela 2014) by Venezuelan author Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez (Black Square Editions).
The novel, inspired by a real-life event of undeclared cash carried from Venezuela to Argentina in 2007, blends the classic noir novel and international political thriller, and is the first by the author to appear in English.
Professor Riess’ work in Cuba, supported by the college over the last twenty years, helped her render the bureaucratic complexities of Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela into English. Wilfredo Hernández, Professor of Spanish, and Shannan Mattiace, Professor of Political Science, inspired the project and lent their expertise to bring it to fruition.
