Summer 2005
PEOPLE
Geneseo Faculty and Staff Travel Abroad This Summer
Numerous Geneseo faculty and staff are traveling abroad this summer to teach, lead seminars, conduct research and participate in fellowships. Additional details on most of these international travels are posted at http://studyabroad.geneseo.edu. Here is a sampling of Geneseo’s traveling scholars.
Nader Asgary (business) will visit Liaoning University in northeastern China in July with a group of students.
Ken Asher (English) will teach Humanities II at New College, Oxford, in July. Graham Drake (English) will assist him.
William R. Cook, a Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, will be in Italy from June to August. While there, he will direct a seminar about St. Francis of Assisi for college teachers. The seminar is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and will have 15 participants. In addition, Cook will deliver lectures in Dublin, Ireland, for the Young Presidents Organization, an international organization of CEOs of major companies.
Beverly Evans (chair, foreign languages and literatures) will be in Paris in June to make contacts and arrangements for a second section of Humanities II to run there next summer. Geneseo’s humanities programs have been so successful overseas that the College now will run two sections of Humanities I — in Rome and Athens — and two sections of Humanities II — in Oxford and Paris.
Anne Eisenberg (sociology) will teach a three-week course, The Sociology of Science and the Paranormal, in Edinburgh in June and July. She will take 19 students, 18 from Geneseo, with her. The trip will include daily class sessions, a weekend trip touring haunted castles, guest lectures by some of the top parapsychologists in the world and additional tours in the Edinburgh area. She also will be speaking with faculty at the University of Edinburgh about possible faculty and student exchanges with Geneseo.
Carlo Filice (philosophy) will teach Humanities I in Rome through June.
Becky Glass (sociology and the Teaching and Learning Center) has been selected to participate in an International Faculty Development Seminar in southwestern China in June under the auspices of the Council on International Educational Exchange.
Jeremy Grace (political science) has a potential trip to Amman, Jordan, in August. The mission is to set up a program to strengthen the ability of Iraqi and Afghan refugees in Iran to organize public information networks. These networks will increase awareness of political events inside their respective home countries so that refugees can make better decisions regarding whether to return from exile and also be included in the unfolding political process in Iraq/Afghanistan while they are still refugees. It is follow-up work from Grace’s work in Afghanistan last summer, where he helped set up a program for refugees to participate in the October elections. The proposal has been submitted to the State Department, and Grace expects to get word just days before he is needed.
Yanxiang “Anthony” Gu (finance) will leave in June for China to complete a yearlong William J. Fulbright Foreign Scholarship. Gu will lecture about futures and options, fixed incomes, and market and securities at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics beginning in the fall. In addition, he will collect data on the housing and stock markets in China. He also will spend the summer serving as an independent senior financial economist at the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Ronald Herzman (English) will conduct a six-week seminar about Dante for 15 high school teachers in Siena, Italy, this summer on behalf of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Herzman said 140 teachers applied for the program.This is the sixth such seminar he has conducted in Siena — the last five years in a row. His co-director for this seminar is noted Dantist William Stephany of the University of Vermont. It is the 13th seminar Herzman has done overall, including four in Geneseo and two in New Mexico. Herzman was the founding program officer for the program when he worked for NEH from 1982 to 1985.
Tze-ki Hon (history) will travel to Shanghai, China, in August to present a paper at the International Convention of Asia Scholars. The title of his paper is “Educating the Citizens: Visions of China in Late Qing History Textbooks.” The paper is a draft of a book chapter that will be included in an edited volume on modern Chinese history curriculum.
Wes Kennison (English) will direct a GOLD Leadership Institute trip in August to Italy, to explore the Palio in Siena.For eight centuries, the Palio Festival of Siena in Tuscany has sustained the spirit and character of this remarkable community. This intense and bizarre bare-backed horse race culminates in a week of good food and wine, singing and strategizing as the neighborhoods, called contrade, compete for bragging rights in the city. Kennison will lead students in an exploration of the Palio experience from the inside, where tourists seldom tread, so the students can learn what this ritual has to teach us about leadership.
Cyndy Klima (foreign languages and literatures) will go to Prague, Bratislava and Vienna to make contacts and arrangements for a new program next summer called The Golden Age of Central Europe.
Christopher Leary (mathematics)will spend a year on sabbatical leave in Germany this year.
Sharon Peck (education) went to Exeter, England, to conduct a course in comparative education. She also has been selected to participate in an international faculty development seminar in India in July under the auspices of the Council on International Educational Exchange.
Dan Repinski (psychology) and Kurt Cylke (sociology) visited the Netherlands, where they have been negotiating an extension of the College’s existing student exchange program. Next year, Geneseo hopes to begin exchange programs for students in psychology and sociology, in addition to its long-standing exchange in geography.
David Robertson (geography) will take students to Alberta and British Columbia in western Canada for geographic field studies.
Elias Savellos (philosophy) will teach a section of Humanities I in Athens, Greece. This is the first year this will be done.
In addition, some faculty members have already traveled and are back. These include:
Jeff Koch (chair, political science) spent three weeks as a senior specialist teaching democracy, elections, parties, and democratization at the Royal Academy of Cambodia as part of a Fulbright program.
Rose McEwen (foreign languages and literatures) visited La Escuela Idiomas in San Jose, Costa Rica, where she is co-directing the intensive language program the College co-sponsors with SUNY Brockport.