An article by Professor of Mechanical Engineering Frank Wicks, “50 Years of Nuclear Power,” was published in the November 2007 issue of “Mechanical Engineering.” It explains how the first nuclear-fueled electric power plants were inspired by the Atoms for Peace proposal that President Dwight Eisenhower delivered to the United Nations. It describes the types of systems that have dominated the global nuclear industry and notes that a potentially safer and more efficient gas cooled reactor is being designed by a team of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the leadership of Dr. Andrew Kadak '67.
Two works by Peter R. Bedford, the John and Jane Wold Professor of Religious Studies and director of Religious Studies, have been published. “The Persian Near East” appears in The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2007), edited by W. Scheidel, I. Morris and R. Saller. It is one of 28 chapters in this comprehensive survey of the economies of classical antiquity. Bedford’s article, “The Economic Role of the Jerusalem Temple in Achaemenid Judah: Comparative Perspectives” appears “Shai le-Sara Japhet:Studies in the Bible, its Exegesis and its Language,” edited by M. Bar-Asher, N. Wazana, E. Tov and D.Rom-Shiloni (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2007) The volume honors Sara Japhet, professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former director of the University and National Library.
Hans-Friedrich Mueller, professor and chair of Classics, presented the paper “Spectral Rome from Female Perspective: An Experiment in Recouping Women’s Religious Experience” at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Chicago. He uses inscriptions composed by women in honor of their deceased loved ones to test representations in classical texts (composed by men) of women’s beliefs about the afterlife. At that same meeting and in his capacity as North American Section head of the International Plutarch Society, Mueller organized a panel on “Plutarch as Antiquarian and Collector of Oddities.” This panel assembled scholars from the United States as well as the University of Sydney in Australia, University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, Friedrich-Alexander-University in Erlangen, Germany, and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.