Front PageHome | Archives | Vol.1, Issue 23 | December 6, 2011

Faculty/Staff Accomplishments

Associate Professor Laura Fine’s article “Space and Hybridity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ and ‘Only Goodness,’” has been included in the South Asian Review, Volume 32, Number 2.

 

Professor Emerita of History Carolyn Happer was the guest speaker for two meetings of Meredith’s Alumnae Book Club this fall. Happer discussed the process of writing “Chosen for Destruction: The Story of a Holocaust Survivor,” with Morris Glass.  Glass attended one of the sessions to share his life story. 

 

Sarah May, apartment manager of The Oaks, was recently elected as the Small College and University Representative for the association of North Carolina Housing Officers (NCHO).  NCHO is an organization dedicated to the education and professional development of housing and residence life staff at private and public institutions of higher education and learning in North Carolina.

Professor of Art History Beth Mulvaney recently presented new research at the annual meeting of SECAC in Savannah, Ga., Nov. 11-13. Her paper, “Open and Closed: Bellini’s Organ Shutters and the Nuns at Santa Maria dei Miracoli” contextualized the panels that once covered the organ of this church in Venice within the realm of “domestic institutional” interiors of early modern Europe. These organ shutters are visual evidence that link the cloistered convent of Franciscan nuns to this important church, a relationship since severed by the removal of the elevated passageway linking the two. These panels form a fascinating image that records within its compositional and iconographic choices the divisions between interior and exterior that also defines conventual culture and supports recent research on the ambiguity of divisions and the porous relationship between domestic and institutional interiors. While these Franciscan nuns may have been kept aloft in the raised choir behind a screen removed from penetrating gazes, their unseen presence was felt in many ways, including commissions of art work to adorn the church as well as their domestic spaces within the convent. Mulvaney argued that these shutters represent the domestic institutionalized experience of nuns at the Miracoli by its play between open and closed, inside and outside, penetrated and enclosed, or what has called the “membrane of interstices.”

 

The Meredith College Art Department will present the 68th annual meeting of SECAC in the heart of historic Durham, N.C., October 18- 20, 2012. Mulvaney is the conference chair of 2012.

 

Professor of Theatre Catherine Rodgers, director of theatre, conducted an information session for the NC Theatre Conference at Greensboro College on November 19, 2011, titled Discover Schools & Majors.  Students (grades 9-12) and their parents attended this session in order to learn about the differences between public and private institutions of higher education as well as conservatories. They gained knowledge to help them choose between a BFA and BA, as well as some options for theatre minors and participation in theatre programs as a non-major.

 

Associate Professor of Chemistry Bill Schmidt presented a talk titled “Poetry Writing in a General Physics Class” at the South Atlantic Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers (SACS-AAPT) conference, held at UNC Asheville November 18-19, 2011.  The talk was about how poetry assignments can help general physics students make connections to physics and articulate physical concepts in a creative format. 

 

“Exploring Life and Careers” was just released by Goodheart-Willcox, Inc. and was co-authored by Martha Dunn Strohecker and Deborah Tunstall Tippett.  It is the sixth major revision of a middle school family and consumer sciences textbook that is used nationally. Tippett, professor and head of Meredith’s Department of Human Environmental Sciences, was the lead author on all the supplemental texts, which included the Teacher’s Resource Guide and the Student Activity Book.