Daniel Mosquera, associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, was invited to present his paper, “Excessive (Nahua) Passions: The 1768-1770 Inquisitorial Case of Chalco Amecameca” at the Institute for Mesoamerican Studies at the University at Albany this month. The presentation was about colonial Mexican indigenous adaptations of the Passion of Christ and the 18th century Inquisitorial persecution of the plays.
Mosquera’s documentary film dealing with the Afro-Colombian feast honoring Saint Francis of Assisi, “Sanpachando: San Pacho is for the Revelers,” co-directed and co-produced with Sean Ferry, is now an official selection of the 2007 San Francisco Black Film Festival. It will premiere June 14-17 and is expected to debut at other film festivals this year, as well.
Mosquera also spoke and screened his documentary film work on the religious feast at the department of Modern and Classical Languages at St. Louis University and in former Union Professor Derek Pardue’s Washington University anthropology class on genocide and violence in Latin America.
Scott Kirkton, assistant professor of Biology, recently organized and chaired a symposium at the American Physiological Society’s Experimental Biology Conference in Washington, D.C., titled, “Advances in Insect Respiration: Integration from the Gene to the Organism.”
Physiology is the study of how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function to create health or disease.
Kirkton also presented a poster, “Morphological and Biochemical Jumping Adaptations in Smaller Grasshoppers,” at the meeting. A reporter from Live Science published an on-line piece about his research under the headline, “How Grasshoppers Are Like Lance Armstrong,” which can be accessed at http://www.livescience.com/animals/070508_jumping_grasshoppers.html
The article, which was picked up by Fox News, describes grasshoppers’ long legs, sprinting femur muscles
and overall athleticism, detailing their development in stages, from tiny sprinters to powerful adult jumpers.
Kirkton, who plans to research biomedical questions related to muscle performance using grasshoppers as a model, said the grasshopper muscle “is the only invertebrate muscle that functions like our sprinting muscle,” and “the only insect muscle we know of that produces lactate during exercise.”
The symposium, which is also sponsored by the London-based Journal of Physiology, featured Stefan K. Hetz of Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, who researched the insect tracheal respiratory system; Gabriel Haddad, of the University of California, San Diego, who spoke on the genetic basis of fruit flies to survive periods of insufficient oxygen supply; Mark Krasnow, of the Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Cal., who has studied the development of the tracheal system in the embryo fruit fly; and biophysicist Jake Socha of the Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, and the University of Chicago, who is best known for his work on “flying” snakes.