September 2021
Outside of the Classroom
A newsletter of faculty activities and accomplishments
‘Alternate Worlds,’ a solo exhibition by Coral Penelope Lambert, Professor Sculpture, is a collection of recent sculptural works that investigate the spaces between twilight and dreams. Exploring the concept of alternate worlds takes on a different significance whilst living alone in a pandemic world. A world where we are all coexisting within our own time and space, it is familiar but strange in subtle ways.
Twilight is a time of day that has a specific presence, and it is believed that if portals can open up to other dimensions then it would be during those hours. Alternate universe, also known as a parallel or multi universe, is a hypothetical self-contained plane of existence, co-existing with one's own. Our sense of time changed in 2020.
Lambert’s exhibition ran from May 14th thru June 12th at the NE Sculpture Gallery Factory,
Minneapolis, MN https://ne-sculpture.org
The American Society for Materials International (ASM) Board of Trustees elected S.K.
Sundaram, Inamori Professor, as a Fellow. This honor recognizes his distinguished
contributions in the field of materials science and engineering. In this capacity he will serve as an advisors to the Society. Sundaram’s citation reads: "For significant contributions to
millimeter and terahertz wave diagnostics of materials and processes, and integrated processing of materials." He will be presented with the award at IMAT ’22 in New Orleans.
Tim Keenan, Assistant Professor Biomaterials Engineering, was interviewed by Zippia, a career site providing career-related information to engineering students and professionals.
Zippia collects responses from thousands of experts across the country regarding the field and opportunities. Keenan’s responses were featured on the main page:
Job Market for Recent Grads
Susan Mayberry, Professor of English, has published her second book, The Critical Life of Toni Morrison with Camden House Press. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is the most important American novelist since Faulkner, the most significant American woman writer since Dickinson, and the most widely read African American public intellectual of the last half century. Her influence as a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and scholar is profound: she changed the face of literature and literary criticism in the US, if not worldwide. Yet despite the ever- expanding field of Morrison scholarship, no book tracing her critical reception has existed, until now. The book is as much a cultural history of America as a reception history of an American writer.
Morrison worked brilliantly in many genres - fiction, of course (novels and short stories);
drama/staged performance; poetry; non-fiction on historical, social, and political issues; and critical writings on the work of others and on her own work. She generated a literary-critical methodology that recognizes and embraces rather than ignores the African American presence in US literature, and thus transformed American academics' attitude toward American letters.
The story of Morrison's achievement in making a home for herself - and for other women and people of color - in the stony bedrock of "white male" American literature is the subject of this book.
Librarians Kevin Adams, Ellen Bahr, Samantha Dannick and Mechele Romanchock wrote an article for the February 2021 issue of SUNYLA News, the newsletter of the SUNY
Librarians Association (SUNYLA). SUNYLA promotes the professional development and collaboration of library personnel across SUNY in order to advance library service to our campuses and the people of New York State. In the article the authors describe their experience with developing the Alfred University Libraries Commitment to Anti-Racism and Anti-
Oppression, which expresses solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and articulates the steps the AU Libraries will take to address racial injustice.
Adams, K., Bahr, E., Dannick, S., & Romanchock, M. (February, 2021) Making a Commitment to Address Racial Injustice: One Library’s Experience. SUNYLA News, 51(1), 4-6.
https://www.sunyla.org/sunyla_docs/newsletters/2021feb.pdf
Kevin Curtin, Associate Professor of Counseling, was a guest on the monthly Podcast What are the Odds, hosted by Jenna Hotaling of the Finger Lakes Problem Gambling Resource Center. For the August episode, Curtin discussed healthy alternatives to gambling and how therapeutic lifestyle changes can foster well-being and optimize cognitive functioning. What are the Odds is produced in partnership between the Finger Lakes Problem Gambling Resource Center and fingerlakes1.com.
Joseph Scheer, Professor Printmaking, was a guest speaker at Together Apart: A remote shelter for artistic practices. This
international hybrid remote residency was sponsored by Proyecto `ace.
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“Lanjing ·Future Media Academy Awards”
(FMAA) launched its first international jury awards and exhibition this spring. It was organized by Professor Xiaowen Chen, The Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing China and the Lanjing Digital Media Corporation.
The first lectures titled "Future Media Scene”--an international art creation plan-- and the "The Dialogue" took place live using the new virtual reality broadcast platform Qi Jing. It was broadcast on the ARTBOOK media platform across the globe. Professor Joseph Scheer, Director Institute for Electronic Arts from Alfred University discussed IEA’s artists in residence program during this live streamed event. Chen served as the chair of the broadcast, and Ms. Yuan Yuan from Lanjing Science and Technology Art Center was responsible for the on-site translation work. Professors Chen and Scheer served as jurors for this new digital media award.
In July, Rob Reginio, a professor in the English Division, had his chapter “Questioning Modernist Poetry: Feminist Poetics in the Classroom” published in the volume Teaching Modernist Women Writers from the Modern Language Association Press. Dr. Reginio's essay details how students can write analytically rich work that opens up lines of questioning rather than offering closure. This kind of writing allows students to write on poetics and language along with modernist women writers. The result is probing work that reimagines literary history, representations of women, and gendered language.
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed faculty to quickly adapt to an online teaching environment and continue it until the end of the school or academic year. An international team of
researchers from the US, Canada, and Italy gathered and urgently studied the challenges STEM faculty members faced during the COVID-19 era as they made the transition to teaching online, while many of them engaged in this shift for the first time. This study was done under Mina Sedaghat Jou, Assistant Professor Education, leadership and identified the affective domain of teaching as the missing dimension of an e-learning framework. This missing e-learning
dimension was named "pedagogy of care" by the researchers and the result was published in the
"International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology". https://doi.org/10.1080/0020739X.2021.1954251
