Posted on May 24, 2002

Kristin Peterson,
assistant professor of Russian, has presented the following conference papers:
“A family of Strangers: Liudmila Petrushevskaia's `The Time:
Night'” at the Canadian Association of Slavists Conference this month
in Toronto; “Framing Evil and Framing Art: Gogol's `Portrait'
and Chekhov's `House with a Mezzanine'” (in Russian) at the
Crimean Ministry of Culture Chekhov Conference, Yalta, in April;
“Writing From the Margins: Liudmila Petrushevskaia's Construction
of Genre and Place” at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference,
in Lexington; and “Teaching Strategies in a Multimedia Classroom” at
the Midwest Slavic Conference, Bowling Green (Ohio) University.

Robert Fleischer, research professor of geology, is the
author of chapters on “Solution Hardening” and “Ion Tracks” in a
recent book, Intermetallic Compounds – Volume 3, Progress
(John Wiley, Ltd.). Intermetallic compounds
are metallic solids in which at least two different types of atoms
are arranged each in an ordered way. In the chapter titled
“Solution Hardening,” Fleischer
describes how atomic defects, called
solute, strengthen such solids, and he
finds that they work much like foreign atoms in hardening regular
metals. In the chapter on “Ion Tracks,”
he describes work over the last few years in which tracks have
been seen in materials where track formation had been thought to
be impossible – including intermetallic compounds, oxide
superconductors, and conventional metals. He proposes mechanisms for
forming local disorder in these newly recognized track-forming solids.

George Gmelch, professor of anthropology, published an
essay on the season's new baseball books in the April issue of
Natural History. Also, Gmelch was named to
the editorial board of Nine: the Journal of Baseball History and
Culture,
published by the University of Nebraska Press. He also
published a review essay in Newsday,
“Of Dinosaurs, Bats, and Balls,” on the “Baseball as America” exhibition
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

Robert Baker, professor of philosophy and director of
the Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership, has been appointed
to the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
Sex
, a 600,000 word volume to be published by Greenwood
Press.  Baker's work in the field began when he and a colleague in
the philosophy department, the late Frederick Elliston, co-edited the
first contemporary anthology of philosophical papers on the
subject, Philosophy and Sex (Prometheus Books), a collection of
papers considered unpublishable by the journals of the day because of
their subject matter. Later editions of the book (currently co-edited with
Kate Wininger, formerly of Union's philosophy department)
broke ground for gay/queer philosophy and for English translations
of French feminist writings.