Faculty publications span art, humanities, and sciences
Faculty across disciplines make significant contributions to their fields and to the Wilson community. Each year the College recognizes their activities, including publications, presentations, awards, exhibitions, performances, and professional service. Here we highlight recent publications. Learn more about our faculty’s at wilson.edu/faculty-accomplishments.
Sherri Buerdsell, Ph.D., assistant professor of biology. Lehmann lovegrass (Eragrostis lehmanniana) removal
and black grama (Boutelous eriopida) restoration in the Chihuahuan desert. Science Direct Online (2023).
Daniela DiGregorio, Ph.D., assistant professor of education/ TESOL. Characteristics of English Learners. In English Language Learners: The Power of Culturally Relevant Pedagogies. Rowman and Littlefield, 2023.
Adam DelMarcelle, M.F.A., assistant professor of graphic design. Exhibition: “Strikethrough Messages of Typographic Protest.” Letterform Archive, San Francisco, 2022-23; “A Shadow that Broke the Light,” Drake Theatre, Philadelphia, January 2023.
Hailey Haffey, Ph.D., adjunct instructor in healthcare and medical humanities. Caring for People and Their Gender Stories. closler.org, Miller Coulson Academy of Clinical Excellence, Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2022.
Diane Morgan, M.A., adjunct instructor
in religious studies. Secrets of the Manatee: An Insider’s Guide to Florida’s Most Iconic Marine Mammal. Pineapple Press 2023.
Philip Lindsey, M.F.A., professor of fine art. Exhibition: 2023 Cumberland Valley Artists Exhibition, Museum of Fine Arts – Washington County, Hagerstown, Md.
Brittany Harman, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology. Quantifying hyperbole: Explicit estimates of exaggerated utterances. With H. J. Strine. Psycholinguistics April 2023.
“Because exaggeration plays such a significant role in people’s lives, it is important to understand the consequences when people are exposed to it. Such an understanding could provide insight into how audiences process major world events that have been sensationalized by authority figures or the media…; the effects of witness exposure to exaggerated statements…; [and] in a legal context, [how] the consequences of exposure to exaggerated statements made by a witness or lawyer…can influence jur”or decision-making.”
Brittany Harman, Ph.D. (co-author), “Quantifying hyperbole: Explicit estimates of exaggerated utterances.”
Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon, Ph.D., assistant professor of history and ancient world studies. Review of Christy Constantakopoulou: Aegean Interactions. Classical Journal Online 2022.08.04.
Kudos to Amy Diehl, Ph.D., chief information officer at Wilson College, on the publication of Glass Walls: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work, coauthored with Leanne Dzubinski, Ph.D., professor of leadership and director of the Beeson International Center for Biblical Preaching and Church Leadership at Asbury Theological Seminary.
“Glass Walls…is a helpful, research- based guide showing leaders, allies, and individual women how to identify and stop workplace gender bias,” Diehl said. “I’m so glad it is now available to the world.”
Michael Cornelius, Ph.D., professor of English, director of M.A. Humanities and
M. Applied Leadership programs. Places of Childhood Fancy: Essays on Space and Speculation in Children’s Book Series. Marybeth Ragsdale-Richards McFarland, co-editor, 2023. An excerpt of Dr. Cornelius’s introduction follows.
Michael G. Cornelius, Ph.D.
Sites of Speculation:
Contestation, Imagination, and the Places of Childhood Fancy
Dimensionality is key if children are ever to become capable of re-shaping the world of adults into something that it is not. In the Harry Potter series, only a child is capable of defeating the evil that infects and threatens
the wizarding world; in The Hunger Games, a child will lead a revolution and determine the moral relativism of its outcomes. This is not because children can impact worlds more than adults; they cannot. And this is not because children can envision a different, future world better than an adult can. This is because children can inscribe imaginary worlds onto existing worlds better than adults. Children can see past the places adults have created and, understanding context- related cues, inscribe new places over them accordingly.
Part of the reason for this is that children have the necessary social sanction to imagine ideas and concepts that are fanciful and beyond the world of adults. A child may see a bare room and imagine—whatever she or he may desire, since such imaginings are encouraged by the world of adults. These dreams or desires are highly unlikely to ever achieve fruition, but the act of imagining them in the first place is deemed a worthy pursuit for children by the world of adults. Adults themselves, on the other hand, are constrained by their own social rules and mores from expressing similar fanciful designs. … A child may see a stick as a horse and act on it, and the world of adults will praise the child for such imaginings; an adult who committed the same action, however, would be deemed foolish, idiotic, or perhaps even insane. Adults surrender not their imagination to become adults, but their right to imagine, and their right to express their imaginings outside of socially sanctioned settings. In the world of adults, “childish” imaginings are best left to children.
Kudriatsev highlights one potential issue with this general construct—the powerlessness of children to impact the world around them and the very nature of their imaginations. Children may be able to envision a better, safer, different environment, but until they are granted access to the power structures that shape adult spaces, they are helpless to impact change. Power is an end for adults; for children, who hold little or no political, economic, or social influence, the newness of such acquisition encourages them to act on what is “right” and not in their own self-interests.
