News & Announcements

Faculty Highlights - Fall 2023

Posted on December 1, 2023 at 2:03 PM, updated March 6, 2024 at 12:27 PM Print

College of Arts and Sciences

Arts, Humanities, Sciences

Issue 2, Volume 1 || Fall 2023

Eric Allard
Chair,
Psychology Department

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Stephen Cory
Chair,
Department of History

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Cigdem Slankard
Director,
School of Film
& Media Arts

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Mark Slankard
Chair,
Department of Art
and Design

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Adam Sonstegard
Chair,
Department of English

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Samantha Baskind
Distinguished Professor, Department of Art & Design

Publication:

  • "Broken Eggs/Broken Dreams: The Art of Emily Steinberg." In Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum, and Sarah Lightman, eds., Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2023), 17-25.

Series Editor:

  • Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination (newest book published in series)
    Volume 16: Ariella Werden-Greenfield and Oren Kroll-Zeldin, eds., This is Your Song Too: Phish and Contemporary Jewish Identity (2023)

Conferences and Invited Public Lectures:

  • Moderator, "Jewish Comics and Remembrance Culture." JEWCE!: The Jewish Comics Experience. Center for Jewish History, New York, NY (November 2023)
  • "Superman's 'Jewish Origins' and Other Thoughts on Jews and Comics." Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium Series on Judaism and the Arts in conjunction with the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH (October 2023)
  • Panelist, "Fighting Fascism in Culture." Symposium: "Fighting Fascism: Jewish Responses from the Interwar Period to the Present." American Jewish Historical Society, New York, NY (October 2023)
  • "The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture." Ohio State University, Columbus, OH (October 2023)
  • "Elie Wiesel and Judith Listernick: Sacred Storytelling in Text and Image." Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Boston University, Boston, MA (September 2023)
  • "Siona Benjamin: Crossing Boundaries and Building Bridges." Skirball Museum, Cincinnati, OH (May 2023) 

Public Interview:

  • Interview of Laura Siegel Larson, in conjunction with "Superman's Cleveland: Lineage and Legacy." Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH (October 2023)

Exhibition curated:

  • The Seventeen: Iron Flock by Archie Rand - Exhibition venue: Bernard Heller Museum, New York, NY (November 9 – December 6, 2023) - Partial showing of Jerusalem Biennale exhibition, held instead as a “pop-up” exhibition. Full exhibition postponed, and due to open in Israel after Israel-Hamas War ends. 

Stephen Cory
Professor and Chair, Department of History

Presentation:

  • Leading a panel entitled "Religion and Politics in the Pre-Modern Maghrib" and presenting a paper entitled "The Price of Peace: How Muhammad III ended the "Alawi fitna in eighteenth century Morocco" at the Middle East Studies Association annual meeting in Montreal on November 4.

Kathy Curnow
Professor, Department of Art and Design

Lecture/Presentation: 

  • Presented a “Protection and Hostility in Nigeria’s Benin Kingdom’s Built Environment.” at the Renaissance Studies of America conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, followed by a brief research trip to Cuba.
  • Guest lecture on exhibiting non-Western art at Boise State University (September).

Sabbatical:

  • Exploring fiction writing based on her research. Dr. Curnow had three writer's residencies: one in Messejana, Portugal, last May (followed by research in southern Spain and Morocco), one in Garden City, Idaho, in August and early September, and one in Summerville, SC, in late September. Each one involved a different novel, and the Garden City residency included a public reading and three workshops on writing with local high school students.

Elizabeth Goncy
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology 

Publications:

*Publications with former students.

Honor:

  • 2022-2023 College of Arts & Sciences Jearl D. Walker Outstanding Teaching Award

Thijs Heus
Associate Professor, Department of Physics

Publications:

  • Invited to publish 3 Department of Energy white papers, helping to define the DoE atmospheric research program over the next few years.

Presentation:

  • Invited to the AGU Fall Meeting, the largest meeting of geoscientists in the world.

Grants:

  • Awarded a $900k DoE grant to research atmospheric boundary layers, together with the University of Wisconsin and NOAA.

David Hicks
Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Design

Art Exhibitions:

  • Multi-Figure Narratives. Solo exhibition. Holy Family University, Philadelphia, PA. September 2023.
  • A Drawing Exhibition. Group exhibition. Exhibit one of my large drawings. Worthington Yards Gallery, Cleveland, OH. September 2023, Online.
  • Contemporary Art in Realism: 2nd International Juried Exhibition. Juried exhibition. Two selected drawings. 49 artworks were selected out of 200 submissions. 3 Square Art Gallery, Fort Collins, CO. July - August 2023, International.
  • Drawing from perception, invention, and memory. Juried exhibition. Robert & Elaine Stein Galleries Wright State University, Greene County, OH. Invited, 2024.

Holly Holsinger
Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Theatre and Dance

Performance:

  • Holsinger performed My Dear, Helen by Hyeja Ju at the South Korea's Global Women's Performing Arts Festival (GWPAF) world premiere. Holsinger also joined Korean and Japanese performers Ji Young and Nakasima Sato and One Dance Project Group toperform for this original work.

Workshop:

  • Holsinger also co-led a five-day workshop in performance creation with Raymond Bobgan, Executive Artistic Director of Cleveland Public Theatre in Korea in Summer 2023. The workshop focused on women's rights and empowerment and featured a community of fourteen women who shared stories of courage, gave voice to female ancestors, and looked toward a better future for themselves and their daughters. A short documentary of that process was featured at the GWPAF in Fall 2023.

Presentation:

  •  Holsinger served on a panel exploring ways for theatres to engage more meaningfully with communities. She made a presentation on the process of creating Ancestra, which began with CSU students and a Summer Research grant in 2013 and will have productions at CSU and Oberlin College in February 2024.

Read more>>

Robert Hurley
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Publications:

  • Reference is Hurley RS, Pillai JA, Leverenz JB (in press). The media coverage of Bruce Willis reveals unfamiliarity with frontotemporal degeneration.

Read more >>

Wenqing Kang
Associate Professor, Department of History

Grant:

  • Received a Scholar Grant ($20,000) from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for my book project, Life in Silence: Male Same-Sex Relations in the People's Republic of China, 1949—Present, during the 2023-24 academic year. 

Conference Papers and Invited Lectures:

  • 2023 “Reemergence of Public Discussion on Homosexuality in 1980s and 1990s China.” Centre for Asian Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. October 19.
  • 2023 “Queer Life in China’s Early Socialist Period” in Queer under State Socialism: A Global Perspective, The University of Pittsburg. February 10-11.

Md Tareq Ferdous Khan
Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics

Publications:

Robert (Bob) Krebs
Professor, Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences

Grant:

  • CESU Agreement: Restore Native Freshwater Mussel Beds in the Cuyahoga River at CUVA (47K a year, anticipated three years)

Elizabeth Lehfeldt
Professor, Department of History

Editorial:

  • Elizabeth Lehfeldt is announced as one of 3 new members of the editorial team for Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Read more >>

Jeffrey Lewis
Professor, Department of Political Science

Publications:

Bibo Li
Professor, Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences and Center for Gene Regulation in Health and Disease

Publications from our lab:

  • K. Gaurav†, M. Afrin†, X. Yang†, A. Saha, S. A. Sayeed, X. Pan, Z. Ji, K.-B. Wong, M. Zhang, Y. Zhao*, Bibo Li*. 2023. The RRM-mediated RNA binding activity in T. brucei RAP1 is essential for VSG monoallelic expression. Nature Communications 14:1576. PMID: 36949076. IF: 17.69.

Presentations:

  • Cleveland Epigenetics & Chromatin Biology Club. CWRU. November 8, 2023.
  • PAraCon, Penn State Univeristy. July 22, 2023.
  • 9th International Symposium on Parasitology/18th National Conference of the Chinese Society of Parasitology. April 8, 2023. 

Students' presentations at international conferences:

  • SK Abdus Sayeed and Bibo Li. "Trypanosoma brucei TEL2 suppresses VSG switching and regulates PIKK protein levels". Molecular Parasitology Meeting. Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA. September 18, 2023.

Services:

  • Dr. Bibo Li at CSU, Dr. Manuel Llinas at Penn State University, and Dr. Maryse Lebrun at University de Montpellier are organizers for the annual international conference Molecular Parasitology Meeting from 2022 to 2024. 

Barsanjit Mazumder
Professor, Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences and Center for Gene Regulation in Health and Disease

Grant:

  • Awarded an R21 research grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). R21 awards focus on high-risk/high-reward exploratory research projects. Recently, work from Dr. Mazumder's laboratory discovered a novel communication route between Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative agent for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the human lung. This newly awarded grant will facilitate the unveiling of crucial insights into the virological consequences of this mechanism. 

Read More >>

Shereen Naser
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology

Publications:

Kathleen Reardon
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology

Publications

  • Shields, A.N., Reardon, K.W., Lawler, T.K., & Tackett, J.L. (in press). Affective associations with instrumental and reactive aggression: Variable- and person-centered approaches. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychopathology.

Sebastian Sensale Rodriguez
Professor, Department of Physics 

Conference:

  • American Physical Society - Eastern Great Lakes Section Meeting October 20/21. 145 registered attendees, five invited speakers (UW Madison, CWRU, Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State University), 30 contributed talks, and 60 poster presentations. Organizers: Sebastian Sensale Rodriguez (Physics) and Ulrich Zurcher (Physics).

Shelley Rose
Professor, Department of History

Publication:

Conference:

Grant:

  • Rose, Shelley with Dr. Molly Buckley-Marudas, Associate Professor, Education. Awarded Martha Holden Jennings Foundation grant to launch the Cleveland Teaching Collaborative Podcast. Call for participants is at click here.

Andrew Slifkin
Professor, Department of Psychology

Publication:

  • Slifkin, A.B., & Eder, J.R. (2023). Visual feedback modulates the 1/f structure of movement amplitude time series. PLoS ONE, 18 (10), e0287571.

Mark Souther
Professor, Department of History

Interviews:

Presentations:

  • Organized a panel entitled "Recovering and Sharing Urban Histories through Digital Projects," where he presented "Green Book Cleveland: A Digital Metropolitan History of Black Leisure and Recreation" at the Urban History Association conference in Pittsburgh in October. He presented a second paper, "'A Wonderful World?': C&S's Georgia Plan, Urban Renewal, and Historic Preservation in Savannah, Augusta, and Macon," at this conference on a "Politics of Historic Preservation" panel.
  • Presented "Green Book Cleveland" at the Peninsula Library & Historical Society in August.
  • Presented "Historical Perspectives on Euclid Avenue" for the Cleveland Foundation's Public Service Fellows program in September. 
  • Presented in a Digital Humanities Orientation roundtable for the National Park Foundation Mellon Humanities Fellows program in September.
  • Presented in a Digital Humanities Funding Workshop roundtable for the Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium sponsored by California State University, Fullerton, in November.

Partha Srinivasan
Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics

Cited Research:

Read More>>

Kenneth Vail
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology

Publications:

  • Vail, K. E., Galgali, M., Reed, D., Helm, P., Edwards, M. E., Jimenez, T., Arndt, J., Lehinger, E., Sedivy, L., McGeary, D. D., Nabity, P., & Cobos, B. (2023). COVID-19-related threat, existential isolation, and well-being. Clinical Psychologist. 
  • Vail, K. E., & Horner, D. (in press). The Captain of My Soul: Self-determination and need-satisfaction help manage death-related cognition, anxiety, and well-being—Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Honor:

  • Selected as a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.

Jacqueline Vitali
Associate Professor, Departments of Physics and Department of Biological Geological and Environmental Sciences

Presentations and Conference Proceedings:

  • Vitali, J., Nix, J.C., Newman, H.E. and Colaneri, M.J. (2023) Dihydroorotase from Methanococcus jannaschii with substrate and product bound. Amer. Cryst. Assoc. Annual meeting at Baltimore, MD. Abstract 379. Acta Crystallographica A79, a329.
  • Colaneri, M.J., Teat, S.J. and Vitali, J. (2023) A case of UV-induced proton-coupled electron transfer in Copper-doped Zinc Creatinine Sulfate: An EPR, DFT, and Crystallographic Investigation. Amer. Cryst. Assoc. Annual meeting at Baltimore, MD. Abstract 381. Acta Crystallographica A79, a331.
  • Davis, A.K. and Vitali, J. (2023) Purification of Methanococcus jannaschii Dihydrorotase and co-crystallization with a substrate analog. 65th Annual May Conference of the Microscopy Society of Northeastern Ohio at John Carroll University, University Heights, OH. 5/24/23

Two of these papers are co-authored by CSU undergraduate students Alyssa K Davis and Haley E Newman.  

Phil Wanyerka
Sr. College Lecturer, Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Discipline-Related Experience:

  • Board Member &Trustee. Cleveland Archaeological Society, a local affiliate of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). We host an annual six-lecture international speaker series and sponsor a summer internship for undergraduate students in archaeology.  
  • Program Director for Anthropology, Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Cleveland State University.

Research and Creative Activity: Archaeological Fieldwork and Museum Exhibits:

  • Supervisor and Principal Investigator. Archaeological Investigations at the Fort Hill Earthworks 2023. Conducted a Phase I archaeological inventory survey and investigation of the Fort Hill Earthworks as part of CSU's summer archaeological field school—Department of World Languages, Literatures, & Culture; Cleveland State University.
  • Archaeological & Museum Consultant. To Ohio City Inc., LAND Studio, Irish American 2019 Archives Society, Port of Cleveland, Cleveland Metroparks, and Others for a Planned Museum Exhibit on the History of Irishtown Bend, a Nineteenth Century Early Irish Community located in the Flats of Downtown Cleveland.
  • Section 106 Consultant for the Irishtown Bend Hillside Stabilization Project, City of Cleveland, Cuyahoga County, Ohio. (in conjunction with the US Department of Transportation (DOT), Maritime Administration's (MARAD) Infrastructure for Rebuilding American (INFRA), and Ohio State Historic Preservation Office (OSHPA). 
  • Mounted a Mini-Museum Exhibition of Prehistoric Artifacts from Northeast Ohio for the Michael Schwartz Library, October 2023.

External Grants Received:

  • Archaeological Investigations at Fort Hill 2023. Funds for radiocarbon dating organic materials found in excavations at Fort Hill in 2023. Cleveland Metroparks Research Grant Program (Grant # CMP-NR-23-003), Cleveland Metroparks ($1,190).

Professional Lectures & Presentations:

  • Archaeological Investigations at Fort Hill 2023. Speaker for the Cleveland Metroparks First Peoples Day, November 5, 2023. 
  • Native Peoples of the Cuyahoga Valley. Speaker to CSUJ's Michael Schwartz Library in Honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, October 9, 2023.

Ph.D./M.A. Committees: 

  • External Peer Review Committee member for Joseph Dober, MA. Candidate. Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama. 

External Grants Received:

  • Archaeological Investigations at Fort Hill 2023. Funds for radiocarbon dating organic materials found in excavations at Fort Hill in 2023. Cleveland Metroparks Research Grant Program (Grant # CMP-NR-23-003), Cleveland Metroparks ($1,190).

Professional Lectures & Presentations:

  • Archaeological Investigations at Fort Hill 2023. Speaker for the Cleveland Metroparks First Peoples Day, November 5, 2023. 
  • Native Peoples of the Cuyahoga Valley. Speaker to CSUJ's Michael Schwartz Library in Honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, October 9, 2023.

Ph.D./M.A. Committees: 

  • External Peer Review Committee member for Joseph Dober, MA. Candidate. Department of Anthropology, University of Alabama. 

Neda Zawahri
Professor, Department of Political Sciences

Publications:

  • Neda Zawahri (Editor), In Press. The Role of Formal and Informal Institutions in Managing Transboundary Basins, World Scientific Handbook of Transboundary Water Management (World Scientific, New Jersey). 
  • Neda Zawahri and Erika Weinthal, Forthcoming. "The Politicization of Water in the Jordan River," in Neda Zawahri (Editor), The Role of Formal and Informal Institutions in Managing Transboundary Basins, World Scientific Handbook of Transboundary Water Management (World Scientific, New Jersey). 
  • Neda Zawahri, Forthcoming. "Adapting to Climate Change in Conflict-Affected Syria." In Marwa Daoudy's ed. Sharing Water in the Context of Climate Change: Examining Key Transboundary Waters in the MENA Region, Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center. 

Presentation:

  • Water Issues in the Middle East, Consortium of Universities in Georgia, sponsored by Columbia University. July 2023. 
  • Climate Change and Water Insecurity, Duke University's Middle East Studies Center. October 2023.

Aimin Zhou
Professor, Department of Chemistry and Center for Gene Regulation in Health and Disease

Grant:

  • Dr. Zhon has been awarded a three-year, $445,500 grant by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant was awarded under the NIH's Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) R15 award program, which supports meritorious research that engages student researchers. 

Read More >>

Ulrich Zurcher
Professor, Department of Physics

Conference:

  • American Physical Society - Eastern Great Lakes Section Meeting October 20/21. 145 registered attendees, five invited speakers (UW Madison, CWRU, Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State University), 30 contributed talks, and 60 poster presentations. Organizers: Sebastian Sensale Rodriguez (Physics) and Ulrich Zurcher (Physics).