In February, Lisa Baldez presented a talk, "Political Women in American Democracy," for the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She also published an article, “Cuotas versus Primarias: la nominación de candidatas mujeres en México," in Han Funcionado las cuotas en América Latina? El impacto de la representación política de las mujeres, Marcela Rios ed. Santiago: FLACSO, 2008: 157-77.
Josh Compton had a piece recently published in Communication Theory, a publication of the International Communication Association. The essay, "Spreading Inoculation: Inoculation, Resistance to Influence, and Word-of-Mouth Communication," was co-authored by Michael Pfau of the University of Oklahoma and appeared in a special issue of Communication Theory, Conversation and Campaign, guest edited by Brian Southwell and Marco Yzer in February 2009. Of the article, Compton writes, “We already know, from decades of research, that inoculation messages make people more resistant to persuasion. In this essay, we point out how inoculation messages motivate people to talk to others, spreading inoculation along social networks. This opens a new modality for inoculation, with important implications for persuasive campaign strategies.”
Christiane Donahue will present a paper on writing in the disciplines and epistemology at the Recherches en Education et Formation conference in Nantes, France, June 17. She will present a paper on international writing research, focused on results from a study of writing in five disciplines in France, at the European Association of Teachers of Academic Writing, July 1. Donahue also led a day-long workshop at the annual College Conference on Composition and Communication focused on international research about writing; the workshop featured 18 international scholars exchanging material from their research and interacting with workshop participants.
Karen Gocsik has just finished proofreading Writing about Drama, which she composed with contributions from Babak Ebrahimian as a companion text for the Norton Anthology of Drama. This is the second such companion text that Gocsik has produced for Norton; the first, Writing about Film (2006), accompanied Richard Barsam's Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film. Writing about Drama will be published later this year.
The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine will be publishing a piece by Ernie Hebert on the one book that comes up every year in Creative Writing classes and sometimes in English 5 and 7: On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. Hebert’s piece was inspired in part by a paper written by a student, Joe Blessing, in his fall first-year seminar, Exploring American Identity. In January, Hebert was a guest columnist for the Boston Globe Op-Ed page, producing six columns for the section, which appeared on Mondays.
With a Polish colleague, Rich Kremer has just finished editing a set of essays on the sixteenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler from works presented by leading scholars at an international conference. Interestingly, Kremer found himself often marking up these essays exactly as he marks up essays in his first-year seminar, asking, What is your thesis? Does this point contribute to your overall argument? Should you cite some sources here? Isn't this paragraph overly long? Might you, in your conclusion, refer back to your introduction? Kremer notes that certain writing problems seem to persist, regardless of expertise.
Gary Lenhart’s new book, Another Look, is a collection of articles and reviews about poetry, selected from various writings published over a 25-year span. Publication is imminent.
Kevin McCarthy will direct two documentaries in the next year: one is on the descendants of black slaves of the McCain family and their lives after leaving the Mississippi plantation on which they lived and worked; the other is a biography of the black Georgia photographer, William Anderson, whose work chronicling the black ghettoes of the South is unparalleled.
Jim Murphy is editing a book with Richard Brooks, entitled Augustine and Modern Law. The book will be published by Ashgate Press in 2010.
This April, Wendy Piper is presenting a paper, "Art as the ’Added Dimension’: Gadamer, O'Connor, and the Truth of Aesthetic Experience,” at the 4th International Conference on Poetics and Christianity in Rome.
