Faculty News
Catherine Goebel was elected to the board of directors of the Midwest Art History Society. She presented an invited Figge Art Museum talk on April 29th titled: Whistler and the Gentle Art of Printmaking. As a Whistler criticism specialist and director of a significant interdisciplinary nineteenth-century project, Cathy was selected as a University of Virginia delegate for the summer program at the Royal Irish Academy's Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin. Her project is aimed at constructing a digital archive for the lifetime criticism of American expatriate artist, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), including unpublished reviews by such notables as Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Charles Baudelaire. The Whistler criticism project will be examined by international scholars alongside other US/UK collaborative projects. Due to the positive response to her plenary address last fall for the Association for General and Liberal Studies conference, Cathy was invited to chair an Augustana LS faculty panel next year at the Association for Core Texts and Courses conference sponsored by Yale University. Liberal Arts through the AGES will be featured along with the honors programs at Yale University and at Boston College. Cathy was also invited to speak on both projects this fall at the Art Institute of Chicago, as she similarly did at the winter conference of the College Art Association.
Adam Kaul finished co-editing a special edition of Intergraph: a Journal of Dialogic Anthropology, along with Tamara Kohn of the University of Melbourne, Australia and Hazel Tucker of the University of Otago, New Zealand. They also co-authored the introductory chapter entitled "Appropriating Creative Practices and Spaces of Leisure." The issue is scheduled to appear online over the summer.
Adam Kaul was recently interviewed about his new book "Turning the Tune: Traditional Music, Tourism, and Social Change in an Irish Village" for the public radio program "About Books". The interview will air May 15th on WVIK. http://www.augustana.edu/wvik/listings-aboutbooks.htm
On March 27th, Marsha Smith was invited to conduct a one-day workshop on "Population and Social Issues facing China" to a group of faculty at Earlham College who will be traveling throughout China this summer as part of a faculty development grant received by Earlham.
On March 31st, Marsha Smith organized and presided on a panel entitled "Issues in Aging" and presented a paper entitled: Intergenerational Tensions and Exchanges between Older Wuhan Women and Their Children" at the Joint Midwest Sociological Society and North Central Sociological Association meetings in Chicago, IL. On April 1, Marsha Smith organized and presided on a panel entitled "Gendered and Sexual Identities" in which Josh Morgan presented a paper entitled "Constructing Masculinity: Understanding Drag King Performance."
On April 11th, Marsha Smith organized and presided on a panel entitled "Deterritorialized Asia" and presented a paper entitled "Intergenerational Tensions among the Iu Mien Community in Northern California" at the ASIANetwork Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
Finally, the edited volume, State and Society Responses to Social Welfare Needs in China: Serving the People, published in July 2009 by Routledge and including a chapter co-authored by Marsha Smith and Zhang Hong, has sold well-enough to merit publication as a paperback edition that will be available in August 2010.