Faculty Notes

Andrea Colvin

Andrea Colvin, associate professor in the department of world languages & cultures, delivered a talk at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's monthly Americas Sync meeting in September. These virtual meetings are attended by members of the military and intelligence community who deal with issues in Latin America. Colvin's presentation, Stories of Resilience: How Some Mapuche Communities in Chile Are Defying Repression and Embracing and Sharing Their Culture, was based on research she completed during her sabbatical in Chile in 2022.

Han Guo

(Photo by Paul Vernon)

Han Guo (left), assistant professor in the department of mathematics & computer science, was awarded an American Mathematical Society Simons Research Enhancement Grant for Primarily Undergraduate Institute Faculty in July. The three-year grant will support his ongoing research of ciliary fluid dynamics and fund an undergraduate researcher at OWU. Guo is pictured with Nicholas Mankowski '25 during a 2024 Summer Science Research Project, where they used traffic modeling to explore the impact of lane-changing.

David Johnson

David Johnson, professor emeritus in the department of biological sciences, and Nancy Murray, curator of the Jason Swallen Herbarium, published a monograph in the Gardens' Bulletin Singapore that describes 14 species of plants from New Guinea and the surrounding islands that are new to science. Several alumni and students contributed to this work, including botanical illustrations by Kate Ball Stenger '10 and maps by Katie Vonderembse '19, Meghan Edwards '22, Alena Arnold '23, and Keegan Floyd '26. An additional illustration by Stenger is featured in the French journal Adansonia from the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle. Other OWU faculty and staff assisting included Doug Thompson (preparing photographs, drawings and maps for publication), Nathan Rowley, Elaine Chun, Jeff Nilan, and Stacy Chaney-Blankenship.

Sarah Kaka

Sarah Kaka, associate professor and Ralph and Ella Schaaf Rodefer Endowed Chair in the department of education, published the article "I Have Never Wanted to Quit More as a Teacher: How 'Divisive Issues' Legislation Impacts Teachers" in the journal Educational Research: Theory & Practice, Spring 2024. She also published the article "'Divisive Issues' and Collateral Damage: The Evolving Needs of Teachers Entrenched in the Culture War" in the Journal of Education, March 2024. Also, Kaka was a guest editor for a special issue of Social Studies Research and Practice addressing the effective use of films in the social studies classroom, July 2024.

Veda Hyunjin Kim

Veda Hyunjin Kim, assistant professor in the department of sociology & anthropology, wrote "Consciousness Torn Asunder? Racial Elevation of 'South' Koreans, U.S. Camptown Prostitution, and K-Pop Girl Groups in the 1950s-60s," published in Humanity and Society, 2024. The article was inspired by a student's question about whether K-pop singers should voice concerns about racism in the U.S. Kim says, "From its inception, K-pop has always been parasitic to U.S. imperialism and the racialized-sexualized bodies of Korean women. Hence, the answer is no. This article explains why."

Amy McClure

Amy McClure, professor emerita in the department of education, was named to the Theodore Geisel book award committee. Sponsored by the American Library Association, the award is given to the most outstanding book for early readers published in the United States. The committee reviews hundreds of children's books designed to support children's first independent reading experiences. Geisel is known as Dr. Seuss.

John McGory

John McGory, part-time instructor in the department of journalism & communication and advisor to The Transcript, authored The Wuhan Games, a novel dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. He lived in Wuhan, China, for six years before returning on a rescue plane. He served as a university instructor and journalist in the city. The book tells a riveting, historic-fictional tale using firsthand sources on how and why the virus was released on an unsuspecting city of 11 million people.

Stephanie Merkel

Stephanie Merkel, associate professor in the department of English, was appointed to the Great Lakes Colleges Association Board of Directors. Merkel has represented Ohio Wesleyan to the Academic Council of the GLCA since 2021. The Board of Directors is the primary governing body of the Great Lakes Colleges Association.

Christopher Modica

Christopher Modica, associate professor in the department of psychology, and student Abigail Markley '24 published the article "Reciprocal Longitudinal Associations between Positive Body Image and Wellbeing among Early-Adult Women" in the journal Body Image, 51, 2024. In this longitudinal research project, they surveyed 18-35-year-old women in the U.S. in three separate waves over 4-5 months to determine if positive body image predicted changes in wellbeing. One noteworthy finding was that increases in body appreciation at earlier waves predicted decreases in depression at subsequent waves; however, increases in depression at earlier waves did not predict increases or decreases in body appreciation at subsequent waves. "Hence," Modica says, "body appreciation predicts 'downstream' changes in depression later on, not the other way around."

Eva Paris-Huesca

Eva Paris-Huesca, associate professor in the department of world languages & cultures and program director of film studies, along with Dosinda Alvite, coauthored the book La Mirada Horizontal. Cineastas del Siglo XXI: Autoría, Compromiso Social y Conciencia de Género, published by Tirant Lo Blanc, Spain.

Lee Richards

Lee Richards, university registrar, published the article "The Methodist Theological School in Ohio and the 'Easter Assault on Racial Barriers,'" in Studying the History of Higher Education Journal, 2024. The article traces the stories of four faculty members of the Methodist Theological School in Ohio who were jailed for their integration activism in Jackson, MS, in 1964. Their actions played a pivotal role in organizing for change across the Methodist Church and its subsequent desegregation.

Liz Starns

Liz Starns, assistant professor in the department of health & human kinetics, in collaboration with Gannon University student Paige Tucker, delivered a poster presentation and published an abstract, both titled The Effect of Ankle Foot Orthotics on Collegiate Athletes' Sprint Biomechanics. She presented at the Ohio Athletic Trainers Association Annual Meeting and Clinical Symposium in May, and she published the abstract in Journal of Sports Medicine and Allied Health Sciences.

Chelsea Vadnie

Chelsea Vadnie, assistant professor in the department of psychology and the neuroscience program, was a coauthor of the article "Cell-Type and Sex-Specific Rhythmic Gene Expression in the Nucleus Accumbens," published in Molecular Psychiatry in April.

Julide Yazar

Julide Yazar, associate professor in the department of economics & business, presented her paper "Asset Pricing Model with Heterogeneous Beliefs: A Hybrid Simulation Approach with Large Language Model (LLM) Agents" at WEHIA 2024: Annual Workshop on Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents in July in Bamberg, Germany. For this paper, she scraped online sources for 57,600 news articles that appeared in the previous year that mention any of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. She then used an open source large language model to assess the sentiment in each article. The paper uses this data to create an agent-based model of partially informed investors. It shows that the trading activity of these investors leads to increased and clustered volatility in asset returns. At the workshop, she also served as the chair of the Expectations and Forecasting session.