Faculty Achievements
2024
November
Dr. Solmaz Bastani, assistant professor of physics, and her students gave two oral presentations at the 91st Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Section of the American Physics Society. The titles of talks were “Developing 64Cu-doped Gold Nanoparticles for In-vitro and In-vivo studies” and “Quantum Dots for Imaging Cancer Cells.” She served as session chair of the biological and medical physics session of the conference. Bastani also published the article “Developing 64Cu-doped Gold Nanoparticles for In-vitro and In-vivo studies” in the International Journal of Sciences: Basic and Applied Research (vol. 74).
Dr. Jocelyn Franklin, assistant professor of French modern languages, literatures and cultures, and collaborators interviewed Guadeloupean author Gisèle Pineau about her latest novel, “La vie privée d'oubli.”
Kristy Hammett, assistant professor of education, presented “Providing Effective Induction Professional Learning Support from the Start” at the South Carolina Association of Teacher Educators Conference at Claflin University in October.
Dr. Jeremy Morris, Dr. George R. Davis, Dr. Lori Cruze, Dr. John Moeller and Dr. Stacey Hettes — all professors in the biology department — published the article “Assembling a physical model helps students grasp human somatosensory pathways” in the journal Advances in Physiology Education (Dec. 2024 issue).
Dr. Anne Rodrick, Reeves family professor of history, has been named program chair of the Midwest Conference on British Studies for 2025-2027.
Dr. Gillian Young, assistant professor of art history, presented “Rethinking the Immersive: Joan Jonas’s Water Media” at the Southeastern College Art Conference in Atlanta in October.
October
David Cantor-Echols, visiting assistant professor of history, published “Chaste Kings and Unsuitable Women: Sex, Interfaith Relations, and Sovereignty in the Castigos of Sancho IV of Castile,” in the book “Premodern Ruling Sexualities: Impact, Perceptions, and Climates of Opinion,” edited by Zita Rohr and Gabrielle Storey (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2024).
Dr. Phil Dorroll, associate professor of religion, published his essay “What has Königsberg to do with Constantinople? An Orthodox Defense of Kant” in the September 2024 edition of “Religion & Gesellschaft in Ost und West.” His article was translated for publication by Dr. Regula Zwahlen.
Ben Ferguson, visiting assistant professor of English, presented an article at the 2024 Arctic Congress in Bodø, Norway, entitled “Whose Story is it Anyway?: The Travel Writer’s Dilemma Between Integrating Outside Voices and Keeping a Story Their Own, With a Focus on John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country.” This article will be published in the upcoming issue of the Franco-English publication “Inter-Nord,” alongside his interview with former Alaska Writer laureate Nancy Lord.
Dr. Jocelyn Sutton Franklin, assistant professor of French, and collaborators interviewed Alexis Pauline Gumbs about her new biography of Audre Lorde. The conversation can be viewed at kwazmanvwa.com.
Dr. Kimberly Hall, associate professor of English. Her essay, “Intelligence and Imitation: Teaching the Turing Test Now” is included in the special issue.
Dr. Kimberly Hall, associate professor of English, has co-authored the chapter, “Integrating GenAI in Higher Education: Insights, Perceptions, and a Taxonomy of Practice,” published by Routledge in the edited collection, “Using Generative AI Effectively in Higher Education: Sustainable and Ethical AI for the Common Good,” co-authored with S. Newell, R. Fitzgerald, J. Mills, T. Benyen, I. Sook May, J. Mason, and E. Lai.
Dr. Ingrid Lilly, assistant professor of religion, published “The Planet’s Apocalypse: Climate Change and Rhetoric of the End” in “Apocalypses in Context: Apocalyptic Currents Through History,” 2nd ed. Edited by Kelly J. Murphy and Justin P. Jeffcoat Schedtler. Fortress, 2025.
Dr. Jim Neighbors, professor of English, and co-authors Brenda Lee Pryce and Betsy Teter have published “North of Main: Spartanburg’s Historic Black Neighborhoods of North Dean Street, Gas Bottom, and Back of the College,” which will be released Oct. 22. The book, and an accompanying website, backofthecollege.org, is the culmination of seven years of research conducted primarily by a host of Wofford students and the collaboration of many members of the Spartanburg community, including more than 40 former residents and alumni of Cumming Street School.
Dr. Rachel Vanderhill, associate professor of government and international affairs, was chosen to be a Council on Foreign Relations Education Ambassador for the 2024-2025 academic year.
September
Dr. A.K. Anderson, professor of religion, published his first edition of “Religion and Medicine from the Pre-Axial Age to Modernity: An Introductory Reader” with Cognella Academic Publishing in July. A test version of the book had been released in summer 2023.
Dr. Laura Barbas Rhoden, professor of Spanish, published her translation of poems by Cypriot writer Nora Nadjarian in Nueva York Poetry Review in July 2024.
Dr. Johnathan Davis, assistant professor of biology, was recognized as a 2024 Education Scholar by the Ecological Society of America and published “Investigating the ecological value of migratory fishes on stream ecosystems in southern Appalachia” on the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis platform.
Dr. Jocelyne Sutton Franklin, assistant professor of French, presented “Toward an Anticolonial Critique: Marie Vieux Chauvet’s ‘Les Rapaces’” at the conference Rasanblaj Fanm: Stories of Haitian Womanhood, Past, Present and Future in July 2024.
Dr. Natalie Grinnell, Reeves Family Professor in Humanities, has published an entry, “The Floure and the Leafe,” in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Women’s Writing in the Global Middle Ages, September 2024.
Kirsten Krick-Aigner, professor of German, published an essay in German on the Austrian artist Lisel Salzer and her life in exile in the U.S. for the museum catalog on the exhibit “Lisel Salzer, Lisl Weil, Hilde Spiel” for the Summer 2024 exhibit at the Museum Zinkenbacher Malerkolonie in St. Gilgen, Austria.
Dr. Ingrid Lilly, assistant professor of religion, wrote the critical study notes and the Introduction to the Book of Job as well as the essays “Leviathan: Reading the Time” and “Focus on Satan” in a study Bible for the up-dated NRSV (Westminster, 2024). Ingrid also designed and published her website and blog this summer called “Biblical Bodies: Critical and Cultural Studies of Embodiment in the Hebrew Bible” (www.ingridlilly.com).
Dr. Amanda L. Matousek, associate professor of Spanish, presented “The Triumph and Trauma of Islands in Latine Storytelling" at the 13th International Conference on Chicano Literature and Latino Studies at La Universidade de Santiago de Compostela de A Coruña, España in June 2024.
Dr. Geoff Mitchell, associate professor of biology, published a research article “Evidence for phosphate-dependent control of symbiont cell division in the model anemone Exaiptasia di-aphana” with several student co-authors in the journal “mBio.”
Sheri Reynolds, the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities, performed her essay “When in Rome” at Stories on Stage: It Happened on Vacation at the Hermitage Museum in Norfolk, VA in July. Her story “The Chiropractor’s Birthday Party” was a finalist for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and will be published in their upcoming anthology in December 2024.
Michael Webster, Jessica Scott-Felder, Rebecca Forstater, Oscar Soto, Diana Farfán and Masha Vlasova have organized a group exhibition of current/former Wofford Studio Art faculty at Goodyear Arts, located at Camp North End in Charlotte, NC. The closing reception took place Sept. 20 from 6-7 p.m., followed by a film screening curated by Vlasova from 7-8 p.m. Webster, Scott-Felder and Forstater are assistant professors of studio art; Soto is a studio arts manager; Farfán is a ceramics adjunct; and Vlasova, formerly an assistant professor of studio art, is now an assistant professor of film and media at Emory University in Atlanta.
Michael Webster and Rebecca Forstater, assistant professors of studio art, were selected to exhibit their works at Philadelphia’s Vox Populi Gallery in July.
Dr. Nancy Williams, professor of philosophy, signed a book contract with Broadview Press (Ontario, Canada) in June. The working title is “Feminist Philosophy and Contemporary Issues.”
Dr. Yongfang Zhang, associate professor of Chinese, has been awarded a $135,000+ NSA STARTALK grant from the National Security Agency and will direct Wofford College’s 11th STARTALK Chinese Summer Program in June 2025. The 2025 program will offer a Chinese language course free of charge to thirty high school or college students. Ann Jenks, the Director of the Office of Sponsored Faculty Research, and Michelle Smith, the Controller from Business Office, deserve great credit in the proposal application and grant management.
May
Rebecca Forstater, assistant professor of studio art, is an invited panelist at Clemson’s 2024 Research Symposium panel “Hallucinatory Practice: Machine Learning and the Boundaries of Creative Production.” Additionally, she is exhibiting work at Coco Hunday Gallery and has been announced as the juror for the 35th Annual Juried Competition at the York County (S.C.) Center for the Arts.
Dr. Ramón Galiñanes, director of undergraduate research, did a write-up in Political Science Today magazine highlighting the scholarship of Dr. Kimberly Hall, associate professor of English, and Dr. Rachel Vanderhill, chair of the Department of Government and International Affairs, on the topic of disinformation. The magazine is distributed to 10,000 members in about 100 countries.
Dr. Natalie Grinnell, Reeves Family Professor in Humanities, gave the keynote address, “Loving the Monster: Medieval and Modern Werewolf Romances,” at the 31st Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature on April 12 in Grand Forks, N.D. Her article, “Creating a Modern Bestiary,” will appear this summer in Vol. 24, Issue 2 of “Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture,” a special issue on teaching medieval and non-medieval literature side-by-side.
Dr. Aaron Harp, assistant professor of music, sang the role of Jesus in South Carolina Bach’s performance of the “St. John Passion” in March. He also sang bass in a recent performance of Charpentier’s “Litanies de la Vierge and Missa Assumpta est Maria” with Chicora Voices, a professional choir based in Greenville, S.C.
Dr. Stacey Hettes, professor of biology, had her manuscript, “Dispatches from the Couch, A Neuroscientist and Her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain,” accepted by Apprentice House Press for publication in spring 2025
Dr. Ryan Johnson, associate professor of accounting, published an article in the March/April edition of the Tennessee CPA Journal titled “A Post-it Note Approach to Ethical Decision Making.”
Eric Kocher, assistant professor of environmental studies, was selected as the winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize for his manuscript “Sky Mall,” which will be published in the fall.
Dr. Anne Rodrick, Reeves Family Professor of History, has two publications appearing this summer: “Lecturing the Victorians: Knowledge-based Culture and Participatory Citizenship,” published by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2024, London; and “Chatting up the Sciences: The Mid-Victorian Lecture-Gossip,” in “Victorian Review” 49:2, 2024.
Dr. Kristina Štefanić Brown, assistant professor of German, wrote the article, “Germany and Mediterranean Crossings: Suppressing Past Traumas and Revisiting Present Ones in Burhan Qurbani’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” which will appear this June in “I.S. Med. Interdisciplinary Studies on the Mediterranean.”
Steve Zides, senior instructor of physics, was awarded a NASA Space Grant in the Research and Education Curriculum Development Subprogram to develop his LIBA course titled Lunar Dreams: the Past, Present and Future of the Moon.
April
Dr. Gillian Young, assistant professor of art history, contributed an essay to the exhibition catalog for “Joan Jonas: Goodnight Goodmorning,” published by the Museum of Modern Art (N.Y) in March. She also lectured on Jonas at the Institute of Fine Arts (N.Y.) in March.
Michael Webster, assistant professor of studio art, will be an artist-in-residence at the McColl Center in Charlotte, N.C., this summer. Additionally, he is exhibiting in April at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Greenville, S.C., and Los Angeles), the Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University (Ga.), the Lyndon House Art Center (Athens, Ga.) and the Black Mountain College Museum (N.C.).
Dr. Jessica Tomkins, assistant professor of history, was an invited panelist for the ASOR-sponsored discussion panel “The Interdisciplinary Nature of Ancient Near Eastern Studies in the 21st Century” at the American Academy of Religion Southeast Regional Meeting held in March in Charleston, S.C. She also presented the paper “What Do Kings Do? Reevaluating the Relationship Between King and Subject” at the annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt held this April in Pittsburgh.
Dr. Jim Stevens, assistant professor of finance, presented a working paper titled “Gentrification Trends during the Covid-19 Pandemic” at the annual meeting of the American Real Estate Society, in March in Orlando. He also served as a discussant for a manuscript titled “Capitalization of Property Tax Incentives: Evidence From Philadelphia.”
Dr. Dawn McQuiston, professor of psychology, organized the inaugural South Carolina Innocence & Justice Conference held at Wofford on May 3.
Dr. Kimberly Hall and Dr. Kim Rostan, associate professor of English, published “Memetic Witnessing: A Transhistorical Analysis of Reconstruction Testimony and #SayHerName” in “Soundings,” vol. 105, no. 3, pp. 259-289.
Dr. Rachel Grotheer, assistant professor of mathematics, co-organized the session “Beyond Mathematics: Interdisciplinary Collaboration” at the Mathematical Association of America Southeastern Section Meeting held March 14 -16. She also gave a talk in the session titled “I Spy an Animal: Faculty-Student Collaborative Research in Ecology.”
Dr. Jocelyne Franklin, assistant professor of French, organized the panel “L’Œuvre de Makenzy Orcel à travers des contextes haïtiens” for the 20th & 21st Century French & Francophone Studies International Colloquium in February. She presented the paper “À la recherche d’une mère sous la dictature de papa-à-vie dans Maître Minuit.”
Dr. Cissy Fowler, professor of sociology and anthropology, served as a guest lecturer on ethnographic research methods for Research Project Design, a course in the American University of Rome’s graduate program in Food Studies and Policies for Sustainable Production and Consumption. She was also a panelist in the virtual roundtable “The Anthropologist as Vulnerable Observer: Compounding Disasters and Anxiety in the Face of Climate Catastrophe” as part of the Society for Applied Anthropology annual meeting.
March
Yongfang Zhang’s project “Presenting Novice-level Chinese Grammar Explanation through a Learner’s Lens” has been chosen by the Chinese Language Teachers Association, U.S.A. as the third prize recipient of the 2024 BLCUP Award for Innovative Excellence in the Teaching of Chinese as a Foreign Language. This project was developed from her 2023 Summer Faculty-Student Collaborative Research with four Wofford Chinese major students: Julia Richardson ’24, Hannah Dozier ’26, Rachel Dozier ’26 and Joseph Partin ’26. This award encourages contributions to the improvement of Chinese Foreign Language education in the United States through the design, development, and application of new pedagogy, innovative classroom practices and teaching tools. Zhang serves as an associate professor of Chinese studies.
Gillian Young, assistant professor of art history, presented her paper “Hydrofeminist Currents in the Wake of Land Art” in February at the 2024 College Art Association Annual Conference in Chicago.
Anne Rodrick, Reeves Family Professor of History, will collate and edit a four-volume collection of primary documents, “Nineteenth-Century Popular Lectures,” for Routledge Press.
Dane Hilton’s article “ACT like a Christian: A Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Through the Lens of a Christian Worldview” was accepted for publication in the “Journal of Psychology and Christianity.” Hilton serves as an assistant professor of psychology.
Josh Harris ’09, assistant professor of finance, was interviewed in February on National Public Radio’s SC Business Review concerning the topic of Financial Self-Efficacy and Financial Decision-Making.
Philip Dorroll’s essay “Toward an Orthodox Ethos of Freedom” has been published in “The Wheel: A Journal of Orthodox Thought and Culture,” vol. 34/35, Summer-Fall 2023. Dorroll serves as an associate professor of religion.
Alan Chalmers’ essay “The Annotated Ape in Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt, or, Sir Oran Haut-Ton,” will appear in the Spring issue of the journal “Studies in Romanticism” pp. 25-51. Chalmers serves as a professor of English.
Dr. Laura Barbas-Rhoden, Jen Bradham and Grace Schwartz presented on “Place-Based Research at Local Scales” at the Together SC 2024 South Carolina Nonprofit Summit held in North Charleston in February. Barbas-Rhoden serves as a professor of Spanish. Bradham is an assistant professor of environmental studies, and Schwartz is an assistant professor of chemistry. Bradham was also awarded a $10,000 fellowship from The Sloan Foundation and Second Nature for energy equity research in Spartanburg.
February
Dr. Douglas Clark, visiting assistant professor of religion, organized a panel at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, titled “Intelligence and Imagination in Hindsight: Memories of Religion and Military Service in U.S. History.” He presented a paper on that panel, titled “Religion and Reconnaissance: World War II Memory and Military Intelligence in Christian Black Power Activism.”
Rebecca Forstater’s work is on view in the exhibition “Slime in the Grass” at the University of Montana through the end of February. She is an assistant professor of studio art. Forstater and Michael Webster, assistant professor of studio art, have been selected alongside studio art majors Annie Heisel ’24 and Maggie Genoble ’24 to exhibit their work in EMERGENCE at The Bascom Center for the Visual Arts. The juried exhibition features work from faculty mentors and student mentees from 23 institutions of higher learning across the Southeast. Forstater and Webster have both been selected as ArtFields 2024 Competition Artists. Their works will be on display in Lake City, S.C., in April.
Dr. Karen Goodchild, Chapman Family Professor of Humanities, published an article, “A New Masaccio—and Other Low-Life Images—from Anton Francesco Grazzini’s Florentine Art History, in Renaissance Studies.
Dr. Natalie Grinnell, Reeves Family Professor in Humanities, published an article, “‘[H]e, which can no pite know’: Murdered Children in the Confessio Amantis,” in Investigo: Interdisciplinary Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Grinnell also published “The Thrush and the Nightingale,” an entry for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Medieval Women's Writing in the Global Middle Ages. Additionally she presented an invited talk, “Interpreting Oxford, Bodleian Library Rawlinson 82D,” at the Marco Manuscript Workshop 2024: “The Whole Book,” at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn.
Dr. Rachel Grotheer, assistant professor of mathematics, co-authored the article “Iterative Singular Tube Hard Thresholding Algorithms for Tensor Recovery,” which has been accepted for publication in the journal Inverse Problems and Imaging.
Dr. Alysa Handelsman, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology, was honored for her work in civic engagement at the 2023 Mary L. Thomas Women’s Leadership Luncheon.
Dr. Aaron Harp, assistant professor of music, was recently featured as a baritone soloist in performances with Colorado Bach Ensemble, Chicora Voices and Taylor Festival Choir.
Dr. Daniel Helman, visiting assistant professor of environmental studies, presented a paper at the International Conference on Labour Relations and Labour Law at Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, titled “Aristotle as strategy for collective bargaining: Understanding three kinds of knowledge.” He also taught two research workshops at Ton Duc Thang University in January, and helped to set up a meeting between Wofford College students on their Vietnam Interim and students from Ton Duc Thang University. Additionally, Helman was featured in a Vietnamese-language news article in Bao Thanh Ninh about the undergraduate soccer championship games that took place in Ho Chi Minh City in January. Finally, Helman published a play, titled “Hypatia’s Math,” in the January issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
Dr. Kirsten Krick-Aigner, professor of German, published the article “Polarizations at the Intersections of Jazz, Identity and Blackness in Ernst Krenek’s 1927 Opera Jonny spielt auf and Bettina Ehrlich-Bauer’s 1928 Still life Jonny spielt auf”in Polarization in North America. European Perspectives. Eds. She also was interviewed by art historian Julia Secklehner for the podcast on artists Bettina Bauer-Ehrlich, Lisel Salzer and Lisl Weil on “The Salon,” Episode 14, for “Vienna to the World.”
Dr. Dawn McQuiston, professor of psychology, was invited to present her research on secondary trauma among jurors and prosecutors at the North Dakota State Attorneys’ Association 2024 conference.
Dr. Jess Tomkins, assistant professor of history, scripted the animated TedEd video “History vs. Egypt’s ‘most powerful’ pharaoh,” which has been viewed 333,000 times.