Faculty Announcements Fall 2013

Education Division
In July, RoboCupJunior 2013 World Championship was successfully held in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, with 190 teams from 30 countries, where Associate Professor of Education, Amy Eguchi, served as a trustee representing RoboCupJunior to help the overall organization of the competition. During the RoboCup Federation annual trustee meeting, she has been appointed as RoboCup Federation Vice President representing RoboCupJunior.  Her paper titled “A Proposal for RoboCupJunior in Africa: Promoting Educational Experience with Robotics” co-authored with Dr. Luis Almaida from Instituto de Telecomunicações Universidade do Porto - Faculdade de Engenharia Porto, Portugal, was presented at the IEEE AFRICON 2013 conference, September 9 - 12, 2013, held in The island of Mauritius. She also participated in IEEE Robotics in Education (RiE) 2013 conference held in Lodz, Poland, September 19-20, 2013 and presented two papers titled “RoboCupJunior: Promoting STEM Education with Robotics Competition” co-authored with Dr. Luis Almaida from Instituto de Telecomunicações Universidade do Porto - Faculdade de Engenharia Porto, Portugal, and “Educational Robotics for Promoting 21st  Century Skills”.

Humanities Division
Assistant Professor of History Michelle Chase submitted an application for a mini-grant to the New Jersey Council of Humanities to support her spring, 2014 course “Curating New Jersey” (HIS 251).

Professor of English, Paul Genega did a book signing and reading in Chicago on September 7.

Professor of Philosophy, Richard Hart has been appointed Vice President for Academic Relations of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars. He also published “Ethics of a Tightrope Walker: Charles Johnson’s Dreamer” in the RE-MARKINGS, a journal of English literary and cultural studies (Vol. 12, No. 2, September 2013), published in Agra-U.P. (India). The publication includes citations from an unpublished paper written by former Bloomfield student Denise Wegel.

Professor of Religion Glen Hayes attended the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Baltimore, November 22-26, where he will preside at a panel session dealing with recent research on yoga and tantra. He will also publish an essay on the uses of neuroscience in the study of yoga practice in the online journal Religion, which he first delivered at an invited conference on Buddhism and Science, April, 2013. He is also updating a bibliography on Tantra for the Oxford Bibliographies Online, which first appeared in 2011.

Assistant Professor of History Laura Hill presented the paper “Let Those Negroes Have Their Whiskey”: White Responses in a Decade of Racial Unrest at the Researching NY 2013 Conference in Albany on November 14.
Associate Professor of English, Martha LaBare, while on sabbatical 2012-13, taught in Latvia, the Philippines and Kyrgyzstan in summer institutes for the Open Society Foundation and the International Debate Education Association. She also took online courses – MOOCS – in Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Penn), Greek & Roman Myths (Penn) and Science Writing (Stanford) as well as the Museum of Modern Art’s GEO-friendly “Art and Inquiry.”

Associate Professor of English Paul Puccio reviewed productions at the Philadelphia Arden Theatre and the Princeton McCarter Theatre in the fall/winter 2013 issue of The Sondheim Review: “Glimmers of Hope in the Little Night: The Arden’s Magnificently Sad Night Music” and “Fiasco Theater Weaves a Spell: A ‘Small’ but Moving Into the Woods.”

McNair Program
Three students, Isaac Clarke, Oleta Sandiford, and Kathryn J. Schaub, attended the 22nd Annual National Ronald E. McNair Research Conference and Graduate Fair at the University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, November 8-10, 2013

Two students, Isaac Clarke and Amerlain Caver, attended the 20th Anniversary Institute on Teaching and Mentoring (for minority doctoral students and young faculty sponsored by the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) in Arlington, VA, October 31 – November 3, 2013.