Dear College Faculty and Staff,

It’s summer! So that means vegetable gardens, summer camps, a little time off, and also intensive research and creative activity in our labs, studios, libraries and offices. I look forward to learning about your activities throughout the summer and into next fall, when students return.

We have some transitions in the Dean's Office, with John Birmingham cycling out of his role as Associate Dean and returning to his duties in the Physics Department. Speaking for the College, we can't thank you enough, John!

I'm delighted that Professor Kathy Aoki, from Art and Art History, has started her term as Associate Dean; I am already grateful for, and impressed by, her wisdom and experience.

In other news, the Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministries is pleased to announce the launch of the new Markey Center for Leadership and Ministry, which will focus on building skills for those already working in ministry. Janice Thornburg is building on her long association with GPPM to serve as the Markey Center's first director. Welcome to your new role, Janice!

I hope to see you in town and on campus, but the newest COVID variants are still out there, so stay healthy and safe!

Daniel

Highlights

Robin Tremblay-McGaw's (English) essay "A Real Fictional Depth”: Transtexuality & Transformation in Robert Glück's Margery Kempe" is part of the just-released book Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics, edited by David Hadbawnik and published by Medieval Institute Publications. Here's the opening paragraph:

While working on this essay, I heard the exciting news that The New York Review of Books is reprinting Robert Glück's Margery Kempe (High Risk Books 1994). It came out in spring 2020. What timing! Subverting the genre of the historical novel, Glück's Margery is comprised of two parallel stories that quickly travel into and across one another. There is the third-person past-tense retelling of Margery Kempe's fifteenth-century unorthodox spiritual life and pilgrimages and a first-person present-tense twentieth-century narrative of a 40-year-old gay man, “Bob,” and his desire for “L,” a younger man whose “relatives are the legendary robber barons” (40). Glück's Margery Kempe is written against the backdrop of, on the one hand, the American experimental poetry community's suspicion of narrative and self, and on the other, Robert Duncan's framing of self as "a made-up thing".Taking inspiration from Kempe’s audacious experiment, Glück's Margery Kempe uses transtextuality and collaboration/community to interrogate gender, appropriate the already-made, and to reveal and revel in the paradox, the punctum of the “real fictional depth” at the heart of “the made-up.”

Rich Barber (Physics) and Janice Edgerly-Rooks (Biology) along with undergraduates Aleimah Andrews '23 (Public Health) and Sean Duffy '22 (Engineering Physics) published an article, “Morphological transformation from fibers to sheets in embiopteran silk" in Physical Review E. Embioptera (webspinners) are an order of insects that use their silk to build domiciles. This work details the mechanism by which webspinner silk fibers are transformed into sheets that protect the insects from rain and predators. The paper has been chosen by the American Physical Society for inclusion in its outreach to the press. It is also featured as a synopsis "Scientists Unravel Silk Habitat Morphology" in APS's Physics, an online APS journal.

Image: Aleimah Andrew and Sean Duffy presenting their results at the Sigma Xi session.

Alberto Ribas-Casasayas (Modern Languages & Literatures) self-published the essay "La colonialidad del flipe / Algunos pasos positivos" ("The Coloniality of Tripping / Some Positive Steps"), discussing the ethical implications of psychedelic/entheogenic substances for therapeutic, spiritual, or recreational purposes. It's the 9th and final installment in a series of essays, Luces y sombras del renacimiento psicodélico (Highs and Lows in the Psychedelic Renaissance) that appeared in his Substack Estados extraordinarios between April and June of 2022.

Jesica Siham Fernández’s (Ethnic Studies) book, Growing Up Latinx: Coming of Age in a Time of Contested Citizenship (NYU Press, 2021) was named a co-winner of the 2022 Outstanding Scholarly Contributions Award for the American Sociological Association section on Children & Youth. This award is given to a book published in the preceding two years that has had a major impact on the field of Children and Youth. Jesica will be recognized with this award during the ASA’s annual conference in Los Angeles on August 8.

She was also named a finalist for the 2021 C. Wright Mills Award for her book. Given by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), publishers of the journal Social Problems, this award is one of the most prestigious, coveted, and competitive awards given in the social sciences. Awardees are selected by a committee of eight sociologists representing a wide range of specialties from across the discipline. Jesica’s achievement will be recognized next month at the SSSP Awards Ceremony on August 6 and on the Society’s website.

Sonja Mackenzie with Queer Reproductive Justice panelists (left to right) and co-chair Marcin Smietana (Cambridge University), Kimala Price (San Diego State University), Tiaa Sudenkarne (Tampere University), and Mwenza Blell (Newcastle University). Not pictured are Sarojini Nadimpally (SAMA Resource Group for Women and Health, Delhi, India), Lauren Silver (Rutgers University) and Laura Mamo (San Francisco State University) who participated remotely; June 16, 2022.

Sonja Mackenzie (Public Health) gave two papers and co-chaired a session on Queer Reproductive Justice at the Reproductive Futures: Emergent Injustices, Hopes and Paradoxes international conference in Tampere, Finland. Mackenzie’s papers drew on her sabbatical research on reproductive justice and kinship while at Cambridge University’s Reproductive Sociology Research Group in 2021. She presented her work on "Biogenetics and/at the Border: Choreographies of LGBTQ Transnational Kinship" as well as "What’s queer got to do with it? Building an integrated theory of Queer Reproductive Justice", an ongoing collaboration with Marcin Smietana (Cambridge University) and Laura Mamo (San Francisco State University). In this paper, Mackenzie and co-authors build on a burgeoning inquiry to tease out connections and tensions in queer/LGBTQ+ positionalities in reproduction and in reproductive justice movements. By further theorizing the ‘queer’ in queer reproductive justice, this work critically examines polarized tendencies of ‘either-or’ positing LGBTQ people as ‘natural’ allies of reproductive justice or excluded by RJ, and the ways such claims can disregard social and political oppressions and contexts.