Michael F. Vineyard, the Frank & Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics, presented a poster titled "The Upper-Level Laboratory at Union College" at the 2010 Gordon Research Conference on Physics Research and Education at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass. in June, and at the 2010 Summer Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Portland, Oregon, in July. The poster, co-authored by physics senior lecturer Scott LaBrake, professor Seyffie Maleki and associate professor Chad Orzel, highlighted some of the development work they did on experiments in an advanced laboratory course.
“Institutional Flexibility and Economic Growth,” by Lewis Davis, assistant professor of Economics, appears in the September 2010 issue of the Journal of Comparative Economics. The article develops a formal model that addresses the interdependence between a society’s economic and institutional evolution. Davis argues that a society’s long run rate of growth depends less on the quality of its economic institutions – the laws and regulations that govern economic interactions – than on the legal and political structures that determine its capacity to develop new institutions in response to changing economic conditions.
Daniel Mosquera, associate professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, was invited over the summer to the graduate seminar “Transmisión de Saberes y Cultura Letrada y no Letrada en el siglo XIX Mexicano” at UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones sobre la Universidad y la Educación in Mexico City. There, he gave a presentation and led a discussion on marketplaces and religious devotions as cultural spaces of popular cultural resilience and socialization in Mexico and Colombia during colonial times. He also co-organized the recent bi-yearly ALARA (Afro Latin American Research Association) Conference, which took place in Lima, Peru in August.
In addition, Mosquera is joining the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JLACS), an international publication based in England that is concerned with fostering interdisciplinary work on Latin American culture and cultural history and with encouraging debate on the teaching and reception of Latin American Cultural materials.