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Faculty Friday Spotlight: December 2022

Bradley Selected into Prestigious Program

Linda Lentz Hubert Assistant Professor of Public Health Erin Bradley, was selected for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program. This national program supports and expands action-oriented and community-engaged research to create healthier communities. Its goal is to produce diverse interdisciplinary leaders who conduct and apply high-quality, community-engaged, action-oriented, equity-focused health research to drive improvements in the health of communities and help advance a Culture of Health. Professor Bradley’s team was one of 12 selected for this year’s cohort focusing on systemic racism.

Read more about her team’s project explores housing and health.

A Meeting of the Minds

Associate professor and chair of Biology Jennifer Larimore recently presented at a meeting of the Atlanta Chapter of the Society of Neuroscience. The talk, “Characterizing the effects of SCN1A mutations on CACNA1C expression,” focused on the research undergraduates Alex Martin, Yommi Tadesse, Rosie Hagel, Mile Beauchamp and Erika Vargo Fiedler completed in Larimore’s lab. The lab uses a mouse model for epilepsy. Larimore and her team were interested in whether changes in a calcium channel (CACNA1C) are known to contribute to anxiety, which is a trait that epileptic mice have. Six neuroscientists gave talks during the session and several research posters were also presented.

Quick Bits

Professor of psychology Jenny Hughes’ article has been published in Psi Chi journal. “Our hope is that those writing research surveys will use our examples of inclusive demographic questions. This work is important because it can help researchers to gather and present more accurate information about survey participants’ identities and demonstrates that researchers value inclusion and diversity when conducting their research.”

Read more here.


Assistant professor of history Reem Bailony published a chapter called “Donating in the Name of the Nation? Charity, Sectarianism, and the Mahjar” in Practicing Sectarians: Archival and Ethnographic Interventions on Lebanon (Stanford University Press, 2022). The chapter examines how sectarianism shaped transnational fundraising during the 1925 Syrian Revolt. It posits sectarianism in the diaspora as a critical process through which Syrian-Lebanese émigrés exercised their patriotic praxis and negotiated their transnational influence vis-a-vis homeland.


Cambridge University Press has just published The Authoritative Historian: Tradition and Innovation in Ancient Historiography edited by assistant professor of classics K. Scarlett Kingsley, Giustina Monti and Tim Rood.


Associate professor of English Alan Grostephan won this year’s Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction for his forthcoming novel, The Banana Wars. It was selected from a pool of hundreds of manuscripts and eventually judged by three celebrated Dzanc Books authors: Josip Novakovich (Rubble of Rubles, Honey in the Carcase), Angel Khoury (Between Tides), and Blair Austin (Dioramas), winner of last year’s Prize for Fiction. Professor Grostephan’s book will be published at a later date. Read more about its pending release here.


Visiting assistant professor of English and alum Anna Cabe ’13 published this novel excerpt in The Margins–a literary publication of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop–for their folio marking the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law in the Philippines. Additionally, Cabe served as a judge in the short fiction category for the 2022 Utah Original Writing Competition.


Visiting assistant professor of political science Autumn Cockrell-Abdullah developed and guest-edited a special issue for the Journal of Intersectionality, “Making Spaces: Art, Culture & Difference in Iraqi Kurdistan.”


Visiting assistant professor of French John D’Amico’s article “J.-K. Huysmans with Wilhelm Wundt: Ennui, or a Mind-Body Problem” was published in the Fall-Winter 2022-2023 issue of Nineteenth-Century French Studies. The piece explores the intersection of literary and scientific imaginaries and the portrayal of mental change over time. He also gave a talk in November in New York City at the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Annual Colloquium on “Transvaluations of Willpower: Baudelaire, William James, and the ‘Poetic Fiat.’” His paper examined the images the poet Charles Baudelaire and philosopher William James used to give form to otherwise invisible cognitive processes.


Vocal Instructor Dawn Marie James traveled to Jamaica after being invited to perform three nights in a Thanksgiving concert series with The National Chorale of Jamaica as part of their 50th-anniversary series.

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