Faculty Focus-October 17, 2022
Faculty members put their knowledge into action so students and others are able to benefit from it. Recently, faculty published journal articles and presented at domestic and international conferences.
Atal Ahmadzai
Visiting Assistant Professor of Government Atal Ahmadzai published a peer-reviewed chapter, "The Challenges of Epistemic Communities in Shaping Policy in the Age of Post-Truth," in the edited volume Global Politics in a Post-Truth Age. Ahmadzai argues that in international relations, misinformation has informed public discourses since the European Enlightenment.
Ahmadzai’s research focuses on the thematic intersection of environment-conflict-development. His scholarly publications are in the areas of human development, global governance, and terrorism. His regional expertise is in South, Central, and Western Asia. Ahmadzai holds a Ph.D. in Global Affairs from Rutgers University.
Caitlin Hatz, Matt Carotenuto & Michael Wairungu
The most recent issue of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, includes two research articles by Director of Off-Campus Study Caitlin Hatz, Assistant Director of Academics and Student Life Michael Wairungu, Hanson Associate Dean and Professor of History Matt Carotenuto and Kenya Semester Program Senior Driver and Head Mechanic Njau Kibochi.
Caitlin Hatz
Director of Off-Campus Study Caitlin Hatz co-authored the article, "Reimagining Risk Management: Decolonizing Crisis Response Through Holistic Partnership Building in Education Abroad."
Hatz holds an M.A. in International Communication from American University and an M.B.A. from Lebanon Valley College. She has spent the last 10 years working in the field of international education recruiting, advising, and developing campus internationalization efforts.
Matt Carotenuto & Michael Wairungu
Hanson Associate Dean and Professor of History Matt Carotenuto, Assistant Director of Academics and Student Life Michael Wairungu, and Kenya Semester Program Senior Driver and Head Mechanic Njau Kibochi published their collaborative research titled, “African Homestays and Community Engagement: A Case Study on Reciprocity and Neocolonialism."
Carotenuto’s teaching and research interests are rooted in African history and the experience of people of African descent around the world. He teaches survey courses on African history and African studies, upper-division classes on constructions of identity and conflict, and seminars on colonial and urban history.
Wairungu holds a Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Virginia. Before joining the KSP, he was an Assistant Professor of Swahili at Northwestern University, Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of the South, and a Fulbright FLTA at Stanford University. Wairungu has worked as a curriculum designer and specialist in Swahili at the Diplomatic Language Services in the United States.
Damon Berry
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Damon Berry served as an expert panelist at the Religion, Secularity, and Public Life After Charlottesville Conference at the University of Virginia.
Berry’s research focuses on the moments when religious and racialized discourse informs exclusion and violence. At St. Lawrence, Berry regularly teaches courses like Global Christianities, Religion & Race, Religion & Violence, Religion in Conspiracy Theory, and American Religious Lives. In 2020, he was awarded the J. Calvin Keene Award, which is given to a faculty member in recognition of high standards of personal scholarship, effective teaching, and moral concern. Berry holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.
Jennifer Hansen
Professor of Philosophy Jennifer Hansen discussed articles and supreme court cases regarding abortion on the Partially Examined Life podcast.
Hansen’s research interests include the philosophy of psychiatry, feminist philosophy, American pragmatism (John Dewey and William James), and phenomenology. At St. Lawrence, she regularly teaches Ancient Greek Philosophy, Africana Philosophy, Introduction to Philosophy, and in the First-Year Program. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from SUNY Stony Brook and an M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College.
Antun Husinec
James H. Chapin Professor of Geology and Mineralogy Antun Husinec published four peer-reviewed papers in geology journals by Elsevier and Wiley.
His article, published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, focuses on the Middle and Late Jurassic record of sea-level, shallow-marine environment, and carbon-isotope fluctuations, and his article published in Sedimentology, studies the preservation of the orbital (Milankovitch) signal within the Upper Jurassic carbonate rocks.
His research in North Dakota led to a publication in Terra Nova and focuses on the global changes in the carbon cycle leading to, during, and in the aftermath of the Late Ordovician glaciation and mass extinction. His fourth paper proposes a new method for automated carbonate reservoir characterization and was published in the Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering.
Husinec’s research examines sedimentary record of climatic, sea level, and oceanic changes. Courses he regularly teaches at St. Lawrence include Oceanography, Sedimentology, and Carbonate Sedimentology. He holds a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, finished his post-doc at Virginia Tech, and is a Geosciences Research Affiliate at Colorado State University.
Evelyn Jennings & Carolyn Twomey
Two faculty members from the history department presented their research during the annual conference of the New York State Association of European Historians in Niagara Falls, New York.
Evelyn Jennings
Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs and Professor of History presented on research from her book, Constructing the Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development 1762-1835, which examines the use of enslaved labor to construct the coastal forts of colonial Havana.
Jennings holds a bachelor’s degree in Spanish Language and Literature from SUNY Oswego, a master’s in Latin American history from SUNY Stony Brook, and a Ph.D. in Modern European and Atlantic history from the University of Rochester. At St. Lawrence, she teaches courses on Colonial Latin America, Imperial Spain, Slavery and Freedom in the Americas, Latin American History through Travel, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Cuba, and Atlantic History.
Carolyn Twomey
Visiting Assistant Professor of History, and member of the NYSAEH board of directors, Carolyn Twomey presented on the use of material objects in the teaching of history courses, specifically her pedagogical approaches to a Jewish marriage ring from the 14th-century Colmar Treasure.
Twomey’s research focuses on rituals and environments of water in the early Middle Ages as well as the cultural and religious history of material culture and sacred spaces from late antiquity to the present in Europe and the Mediterranean.
Patti Frazer Lock, Robin Lock, and Michael Schuckers
Three faculty from the mathematics, computer science, and statistics department participated in the Joint Statistics Meeting held in Washington D.C., and presented research at an international conference.
Patti Frazer Lock
Professor Mathematics Patti Frazer Lock organized and chaired a panel that welcomed 10 experts to discuss increasing opportunities for undergraduates in statistics and data science.
Frazer Lock teaches courses across the spectrum of mathematics and statistics at St. Lawrence and collaborates with undergraduates on her research in graph theory. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Robin Lock
Professor of Statistics Robin Lock presented a talk on “Applications of Poisson Models for Rating Teams and Predicting Outcomes of Soccer Matches.” He described joint work completed with Brenden Bready ’22 on bivariate Poisson models for rating offensive and defensive abilities of soccer teams based on past league game results and predicting the outcomes of future matches.
Lock holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Michael Schuckers
Charles A. Dana Professor of Statistics and department chair of Mathematics, Computer Science and Statistics Michael Schuckers served as an elected officer for a Joint Statistics Meeting section on Statistics in Sports of the American Statistical Association. He also presented a paper on bias in biometric authentication systems during the “Understanding and Mitigating Demographic Bias in Biometric Systems” workshop at the 2022 International Conference on Pattern Recognition held in Montréal, Québec.
Schuckers’ paper focused on methods for determining if there are statistical differences between demographic groups for these systems on their false reject rates.
Throughout his career, Schuckers has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He has conducted sports analytics work for a Major League Baseball team, a National Hockey League team, and additional sports organizations. Schuckers is an author and co-editor of the Quantitative and Mathematics Support Centers: A Handbook for Directors of Quantitative and Mathematics Support Centers. Among the courses he regularly teaches at St. Lawrence are Applied Statistics, Probability, Mathematical Statistics, and Statistical Methods of Data Collection.
Peter Pettengill
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Peter Pettengill co-authored the fourth edition of Studies in Outdoor Recreation: Search and Research for Satisfaction, a standard text in courses on parks and outdoor recreation, a guide to scholarly literature for graduate students and researchers, and a reference book for managers and practitioners.
Led by Robert E. Manning, the book’s co-authors are leading scholars from across the United States and the world, including Kelly Goonan '07.
Pettengill has worked for the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management and conducted fieldwork in Acadia, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Zion National Parks. He holds a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont, an M.S. in Environmental Law from Vermont Law School, and a B.S. in Environmental & Resource Economics from the University of New Hampshire.
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St. Lawrence’s Faculty Focus is a regular roundup of noteworthy faculty news.
