Faculty Focus-April 22, 2025
Faculty members put their knowledge into action so students and others are able to benefit from it. Recently, faculty published peer-reviewed articles, were profiled for academic journals, and wrote opinion pieces in prominent publications.
Mike Temkin
Professor and Co-Chair of Biology Mike Temkin was recently profiled by BioOne, a non-profit collaborative founded “to address the inequities posed by commercial journal publishing.” Temkin is a member of the Executive Committee of the American Microscopical Society and currently serves as the Interim Editor-in-Chief of its journal, Invertebrate Biology.
Volumes of that journal from 2000 to present can now be accessed through BioOne Complete, thanks to a new partnership between the American Microscopical Society and BioOne. To celebrate the new partnership, BioOne asked Temkin to be the subject of its first “Publisher Profile”—a series intended to highlight “the human narratives that shape scientific research and scholarly communication in our community.”
Temkin, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, is interested in the reproduction, development, and evolution of both invertebrates and vertebrates.
Mert Kartal
Associate Professor of Political Science Mert Kartal recently examined the implications of French far-right politician Marine Le Pen’s five-year ban from public office following her conviction for embezzling European Union funds in his latest piece for Good Authority, a prominent political science platform that translates academic research into accessible content for a broader audience.
Le Pen’s supporters, Kartal writes, claim the ruling is politically motivated. But Kartal argues the verdict is a reminder that democratic accountability applies even to the most powerful political figures. Upholding the rule of law, even when politically inconvenient, is essential to the legitimacy of democratic institutions. The real danger, Kartal says, lies in turning a blind eye to legal accountability.
Kartal serves as a fellow at Good Authority, where he draws on his expertise in European Union politics, good governance, and corruption control to offer in-depth analyses of current events and pressing political issues for the general public.
Rafael Castillo Bejarano
Visiting Assistant Professor of World Languages, Cultures and Media, and Co-Coordinator of Caribbean, Latin American, and Latino studies Rafael Castillo Bejarano recently published a peer-reviewed article, "«Sino mostrar creído»: retórica de la sinceridad en la lírica cortesana del conde de Villamediana."
In the article, Castillo Bejarano analyzes the poetics of the Count of Villamediana—a poetics that presents itself as anti-artistic and anti-erudite—employing a nuanced rhetoric of sincerity to project, within the exclusive palace milieu, his image as both an accomplished courtier and a genuine aristocrat.
Castillo Bejarano also recently presented on the poetics of sincerity in Early Modern Iberian pastoral novels at the annual conference of the Renaissance Society of America, held in Boston, and on palatial culture in Lope de Vega's play La prueba de los ingenios at the IV Annual Early Modern Hispanic Studies Symposium at Colgate University.
Zane Griffin Talley Cooper
Assistant Professor of Digital Media & Film Zane Griffin Talley Cooper recently published an essay in a special issue of Data & Society's Points series. The series, titled The Cloud is Dead: A Series on Living With Legacies of Resource Extraction, explores "how communities have addressed the unequal power dynamics between technology production and deployment, and how tech impacts people’s everyday lives and the environment around them."
Cooper's contribution, "The Network State and Topological Fetishism in Greenland," juxtaposes past, present, and future imaginaries of Greenland against the actually-existing future-making happening on the ground. Through the lens of an experimental farm in South Greenland, Cooper argues for attention to be drawn to smaller, situated technological interventions, as opposed to the larger ideologically driven fantasies of the broader tech industry.
