October People Notes

Juan Alonso, professor of Spanish, was invited to serve as president of the jury for the Amado Alonso Prize in Pamplona, Spain, for this year's best book of literary criticism. The award is 6,000 Euros, and it is sponsored by the government of Navarra and the University of Navarra. He will publish two essays, "Marching Ethicists" and "Shamans, Hysteria and Gertrude Stein as Hero," in forthcoming issues of Canada's Queen's Quarterly. His short story, "Love and the Imitation Artist," has been accepted for publication in Boulevard Magazine out of St. Louis University.

Dr. Gardner Bassett, assistant professor of restorative dentistry and head of the Division of Operative Dentistry at the School of Dental Medicine, has been elected as a faculty member of Omicron Kappa Upsilon, the national dental honor society. He also has been elected to the editorial board of The Journal of Operative Dentistry.

Denise Castronovo has been hired as a specialist in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Center, located in the Tisch Library. She has several years of experience in both academic and commercial applications of GIS, with special expertise in GIS software, databases, programming and graphic presentation. Castronovo is available to help faculty with GIS applications in their research area and to introduce their students to GIS through the development of specialized course modules.

Eric Chaisson, director of the Wright Center, recently gave several keynote talks on distant continents. "The Rise of Complexity in Nature" was delivered at the Triennial Astrobiology Conference on the Great Barrier Reef, and "An Energetics Approach to Complexity Writ Large" was delivered at an invitational meeting at Windsor Castle outside of London. Chaisson also premiered two new movies at the Sydney convention center that were produced by the Wright Center. Closer to home, he recently gave colloquia at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston College.

Consuelo Cruz, assistant professor of political science, and Anna Seleny, visiting assistant professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, published an article, "Reform and Counter-Reform: The Path to Market in Hungary and Cuba," in the journal Comparative Politics.

Deborah Digges, professor of English, has had her fourth book of poems, TRAPEZE, accepted for publication by Alfred A Knopf. It will be published in early spring 2004.

Lydia Francis, assistant professor of Chinese literature and culture, received a Mellon Research Semester Fellowship for the fall 2002 semester and a Fairbank Center Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University for 2002-03 for her research project on "The Stigma and Allure of Difference: The Classical Chinese Stage Tale of the High Qing (1661-1799)."

James M. Glaser, associate professor of political science, published two articles, "The Preference Puzzle: Educational Differences in Racial-Political Attitudes" in the journal Political Behavior and "Social Context and Inter-Group Political Attitudes: Experiments in Group Conflict Theory" in The British Journal of Political Science.

Boris Hasselblatt, associate professor of mathematics, was an invited speaker at a workshop on "Algorithms and Asymptotics" in Graz, Austria, in early July. During the following two weeks, he was a guest at the International Erwin Schrödinger Institute for Mathematical Physics in Vienna, where he collaborated with Jörg Schmeling of Lund University in Sweden. This collaboration continued in Berlin during the last week of July. In September, Elsevier Science published the 1236-page Handbook of Dynamical Systems, edited by Hasselblatt and A. Katok of Pennsylvania State University. Hasselblatt is also a co-author of the text. Hasselblatt had an article published in September in the journal Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems. With Daniel Keesing, a Tufts undergraduate, Hasselblatt also completed and submitted a research paper in June, and a second paper with M. Guysinsky, formerly of Tufts, and Victoria Rayskin was completed in August. Hasselblatt will present the joint work at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society on October 6, and again as the opening speaker of a seminar/workshop series at Freie Universität Berlin on October 15.

Marcie Hershman, lecturer in English, will speak at the Cambridge Forum on October 16 on the issues raised by her latest book, the memoir, Speak to Me: Grief, Love and What Endures (Beacon Press.) The event will be taped for National Public Radio. The Cambridge Forum takes place at 7:30 p.m., at 3 Church Street, Cambridge, Mass., and is free to the public. Over the summer, Hershman gave a number of readings from Speak to Me and also taught two intensive, weeklong workshops in memoir at Split Rock Arts at the University of Minnesota and at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass.

Ronna Johnson, lecturer in English, co-edited the book Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Rutgers University Press, 2002). She gave a book-related talk, "Women Writing the Beat Generation," at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., in June.

Maura Kenny of Digital Collections and Archives has been appointed project coordinator for the MacJannet Papers. Donald MacJannet, A16, H33, H79, was a benefactor of Tufts University and an educator who, with his wife, Charlotte, established his own international schools and camps. His greatest gift to the institution was the priory in Talloires, France, which the university uses as the Tufts European Center. The MacJannet Papers contain a rich variety of materials reflecting the MacJannets' wide-ranging interests and activities in both Europe and the United States throughout the 20th century. Through the generous support of the MacJannet Foundation, Kenny will be working to create expanded digital access to materials from this extensive collection, including documents, images and audio.

Dr. Karl Kraus, professor of clinical sciences at the School of Veterinary Medicine, will publish a new book, External Fixation of Small Animals, in January 2003.

Carine Lai, a student in the political science department, received an award from Pi Sigma Alpha, the political science honor society, for best paper written in an undergraduate course. Nominations to this competition come from political science departments across the country. Lai's paper, "School Vouchers and the Establishment Clause," written for Prof. Marilyn Glater's constitutional law course, was one of three papers recognized at the 2002 meeting of the organization.

Leslie Lawrence, lecturer in English, has had her essay, "On the Mowing," accepted for publication next spring in Fourth Genre, a journal of creative nonfiction. The essay "tells how I discovered, came to love—and then to lose—a few acres of cleared land in rural New Hampshire," Lawrence says. "At the same time, it discusses how economics and politics, as well as the natural process of 'succession,' can transform a landscape—or in this case—turn a clearing into a forest or visa versa. Thus the essay becomes a meditation on the themes of time, change and loss."

Richard M. Lerner, Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, and the Applied Developmental Science Institute and the Child and Family Policy Center at Vanderbilt University are co-sponsoring, "Family Re-Union 11: Families and Youth," in Nashville, Tenn., October 20-21. Family Re-Union looks at positive youth development and families and will be moderated by Al and Tipper Gore. From October 28-30, Lerner will be at Wichita State University in Kansas as the first speaker in the Wichita Lyceum, a distinguished lecture series. He will give presentations on "Building University-Community Partnerships to Promote Positive Youth Development" and "A Developmental Systems Theory to Applied Developmental Science: A Contemporary Synthesis."

Claudia Mejia, lecturer in Spanish, organized the 3rd Colombian Film Festival, which took place July 18-20 at the Olin Center on the Medford/Somerville campus. The festival was co-sponsored by the Colombian Consulate in Boston and Fleet Bank. Mejia reports the event was a big success, and hundreds of spectators had the unique opportunity to view the latest feature films and documentaries produced by Colombian directors.

Zbigniew Nitecki, professor of mathematics, spent six weeks this summer as a visiting scholar at the Institut fuer Mathematische Stochastik, Georg-August Universitaet, Goettingen, Germany, giving several talks there. He gave an invited address at New Directions in Dynamical Systems 2002, a satellite conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Kyoto, Japan.

Fred Norregaard, chef manager for central production in Dining Services, won a silver medal in an American Culinary Federation-sanctioned team competition held during the 8th annual Chef Culinary Conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on June 21. The competition was classified as a Category F Hot Food Competition for teams of four and was the first competition of its kind in New England. This was the first hot food competition Norregaard has entered and only the second time he has competed.

Lynne Pepall and Dan Richards, both associate professors of economics, presented a paper, "Product Differentiation, Cost-Reducing Mergers and Consumer Welfare," at the annual meetings of the European Economics Association in Venice in July. The paper, which also was co-authored by George Norman, Cummings Family Professor in Entrepreneurship and Business Economics, addressed the competitive effects of mergers in markets selling differentiated products. Also in July, Pepall and Richards published a paper on "The Simple Economics of Brand-Stretching" in the Journal of Business on how firms with a well-known brand name in one market might leverage that identity to enter into another, unrelated market. Thus, Virgin started as a music recording firm, moved into airlines, and then later, opened up a beverage product line. Similarly, Harley-Davidson markets a line of cologne and grooming products for men. The paper explores the underlying logic and implications of such behavior for economic theory.

Elizabeth J. Remick, assistant professor of political science, published an article, "The Significance of Variation in Local States: The Case of Twentieth-Century China," in the July 2002 issue of the journal Comparative Politics.

Rebecca Rounds, associate director of the Tufts Dental Fund and dental alumni relations for the past three years, has left Tufts to move to California. As liaison to the Dental Alumni Association, she nurtured growth in mentor programming, the annual golf tournament and reunions.

Shelly Ruocco has been appointed director for employee relations and employment for the Medford/Somerville campus. She has worked as the senior human resources representative on the Medford/Somerville campus since June 1999. Prior to joining Tufts, Ruocco worked in human resources in a variety of settings, including the hotel industry, nonprofit organizations and other academic institutions.

Rhonda Ryznar has joined Tufts as part-time manager of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Center and a specialist in methods of spatial analysis in GIS. Ryznar most recently worked at the University of North Carolina and is available to consult with students and faculty interested in using the many powerful tools of GIS and spatial statistical methods in research.

Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Oratory and professor of drama, has been chosen as a distinguished scholar by the American Society for Theatre Research. This annual award is given to a scholar who is distinguished in the fields of theater history and performance studies and in teaching over the course of a career. Senelick will receive the award at the society's annual conference in Philadelphia in November. Senelick also will deliver a paper at the conference on "Consuming Passions: Eating and the States at the Fin de siecle." He spoke on Turgenev's A Month in the Country for the Huntington Theatre in Boston in September and will talk about gender impersonation in the theater for the Boston Athenaeum in October.

Emese Soos, French language coordinator in the Department of Romance Languages, accompanied a Tufts alumni group in June on a trip to the Dordogne, an area of France famous for prehistoric cave art, medieval fortified castles and churches and confections of goose and duck liver garnished with truffles. The trip was part of Alumni Relations' Travel & Learn Program. Dordogne's colorful past includes close association with the essayist Michel de Montaigne, with Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of two kings and mother of two as well, with both epic and courtly love poetry and many wars of religion and succession. These provided great subjects for the lectures Soos delivered to the group. Right after the Dordogne trip, under the auspices of French Traveler, Soos spent 10 days in Paris lecturing to a group of American high school teachers about the Belle Epoque (1880-1914). Morning classes were followed by afternoon visits to museums, walks on the slopes of Montmartre in the footsteps of the many artists who lived and worked there, walks around Paris in search of Art Nouveau architecture and dining in period restaurants.

Grace Talusan, J94, lecturer in English, spoke at a Filipino American studies conference at the University of Connecticut on September 24 on the panel "Waiting for a Flip Revolution: Writing and Publishing Filipino American Literature." On October 10, Talusan will give a reading at the University of California at Los Angeles with Asian American women writers.

Amy Welch, who served as coordinator of the Tufts Dental Fund and Alumni Relations for two the past years, has been promoted to associate director of the Tufts Dental Fund and Alumni Relations. Prior to coming to Tufts, Welch was an account coordinator at Cunningham Communications, in Cambridge, Mass., and director of business and tourism development for the Kinston-Lenoir County Chamber of Commerce in Kinston, N.C. Welch received her undergraduate degree in communications from Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. As associate director, she will establish and maintain relationships with alumni and the dental school through communication and events such as Dental Homecoming and Reunion weekend, regional receptions and student-alumni mentor panels. She will develop strategies for outreach to engage alumni and encourage their involvement to strengthen their connection with the dental school.

Xueping Zhong, associate professor of Chinese literature and culture, has received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for January 1-June 30, 2003. Her research project is titled "The Other Chinese Box: Television Culture and the Production of Meaning in the Age of Market Reforms."