Professor of Religious Studies Steve Humphries-Brooks was recently interviewed for BBC World Service about the second coming of Christ. The interview was based on a recent Pew Research poll that indicated four in 10 Americans between the ages of 21 and 26 believe Jesus will return by 2050. Humphries-Brooks discussed why the apocalypse is so important to young Americans. More ...

Nancy Rabinowitz, the Margaret Bundy Scott Profesor of Comparative Literature, presented her research at the Open University conference titled "Classics in the Modern World-A Democratic Turn?" in Milton Keynes, UK. The conference brought together scholars from all over the world to discuss whether the use of antiquity in modern times is in fact democratic. Her talk, "Expanding Tragedy as Critique," focused on contemporary uses of tragedy to critique the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Assistant Professors of Chemistry Nicole L. Snyder and Adam Van Wynsberghe have each received a Cottrell College Science Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. These grants each supply $35,000 for the investigators’ research programs and include funds for equipment, supplies, and faculty and student stipends. Fifty-seven of these awards were funded nationally in 2010. More ...

Assistant Professor of Art Rebecca Murtaugh is currently exhibiting at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Mich. Her solo show titled "Temptations" opened on June 11 and runs until August 6, and features four series of art works. More ...

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu gave the keynote speech at TCLT6, the 6th International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching in the 21st Century, held at the Ohio State University on June 12-14. His talk was titled “Assessment of Participatory Learning Tools and Selection of Virtual Classroom Software (VCS).”
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Hong Gang Jin, the William R. Kenan Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures, published an article titled “Task Complexity and its Effects on Interaction & Production: An Experimental Study of Task-based Instruction” in the May issue of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (JCLTA). The article presents the results of her study about “the effect of task complexity on language and interaction in a Chinese as a foreign language context.” More ...

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Russell Marcus has published two articles in the spring issue of the American Philosophical Association’s Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy. More ...

Richard Werner, the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy, has published the lead article "Hope and the Ethics of Belief," in Positive Peace, edited by Andrew Fitz-Gibbon and with an introduction by Arun Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi's grandson (Rodopi, 2010). Using the reasoning of William James' "Sentiment of Rationality" and recent findings in empirical psychology, Werner argues that we should be hopeful when the facts allow because of the self-fulfillling prophecy that can be contained in hope. Hope is to be preferred to trendy cynicism. More ...

Professor of Economics Betsy Jensen and Associate Professor of Economics Steve Wu have published an article, “Early Decision and College Performance,” in the August 2010 issue of the Economics of Education Review. (Volume 29, Issue 4, Pages 517-525, August 2010) More ...

Assistant Professor of Physics Natalia Connolly has been granted observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) during its “Cycle 18,” which runs from Sept. 1, 2010, through Aug. 31, 2011. HST cycles are time periods during which research projects, selected in a highly competitive peer review process, are executed. Fewer than one-third of all research proposals are accepted. Cycle 18 will have about 3,000 HST orbits available to researchers.
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