Brenda Wineapple, Washington Irving Professor of Modern Literary and
Historical Studies, recently published an essay, “The Transformation in Parnassus,“
about novelists who use real poets as subjects in their fiction, and an
essay about her choice of biographical subjects, “Strange Bedfellows,”
in culturefront, the magazine for the New York State Council for the
Humanities. She also gave the concluding remarks at last spring's Nathaniel
Hawthorne Society meeting in Boston, which celebrated the 150th publication of The
Scarlet Letter. Called “Scarlet Letters and White Lies,” her talk
discussed the problems she faced writing Hawthorne's biography.
Joseph B. Board Jr., Robert Porter Patterson Professor of Government,
was inducted into the Indiana University School of Law's Academy of Law
Alumni, a recognition of graduates who have attained distinction in the legal
profession. Board and three other inductees were honored at a ceremony recently
at the IU-Bloomington campus. Board earned his A.B. in government from IU. He
also earned a B.A. and master's in jurisprudence at Oxford University, where
he was a Rhodes Scholar. He earned a law degree from IU School of Law, and a
Ph.D. in government, also from IU. At Union since 1965, he specializes in
Swedish government and politics.
Robert Fleischer, research professor of geology, was co-author (with
W. R. Giard and L. G. Turner of GE) of an article “Membrane-Based Thermal
Effects in Rn-222 Dosimetry” in the journal Radiation Measurements.
The article discussed an improvement in methods for measuring radon, showing
that membranes used to exclude the unwanted isotope radon-220 from measurements
of the usual radon (Rn-222) allow different amounts to pass depending on the
temperature of the membrane. Documenting the effect permits more accurate
measurements. He also co-authored (with students Stephen A. Hadley and Nicholas
R. Meyer, and Alfred Cavallo of the U. S. Department of Energy) an article,
“Eyeglass Lenses for Personel Radon Dosimetry,” in Health Physics. The
article describes the technique (developed by Fleischer) of using the nuclear
track detection ability of most plastic lenses for eyeglasses. Because the
radioactive decay of radon gives off particles that the lenses record, the
accumulation of tracks is a record of the radon exposure of the lenses, and
hence of their wearers.