The Academic Minute for 2021.08.23-2021.08.27

The Academic Minute from 08.23 – 08.27

Monday, August 23rd
Ximena Garcia-Rada – Texas A&M University
Consumers Value Effort over Ease When Caring for Closer Others
I am an assistant professor of marketing at Mays Business School, Texas A&M University researching consumer behavior and well-being with an emphasis on close, personal relationships. ​I use a wide range of tools—laboratory experiments, field studies, in-depth interviews, and analysis of archival data—to investigate the psychological processes underlying how consumers make decisions when taking care of their families and sharing experiences with relationship partners. I am originally from Lima, Peru. I received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Universidad de Lima (2007), an MBA from INCAE Business School (2009), and a Doctorate in Business Administration from Harvard Business School (2021).

Tuesday, August 24th
Ann Duncan – Goucher College
Sacred Pregnancy in the Age of the “Nones”
Ann W. Duncan (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Associate Professor of American Studies and Religion at Goucher College in Baltimore, MD.  Her research and teaching focus on intersections of religion and public life including religion and politics, new religious movements, the religious “nones” and motherhood and American religion. She has authoried articles in various journals including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and Nova Religio and is co-editor of Church-State Issues in America Today, 3 vols. (Praeger, 2007) and The Universe is Indifferent: Phiosophical and Theologcal Perspectives on Mad Men (Cascade, 2016). She is currently completeing a book manuscript titled Sacred Pregnancy: Women’s Reporductive Health and the Female Spiritual Economy.

Wednesday, August 25th
Mithun Bhowmick – Miami University
Shockwaves
Dr. Bhowmick’s research is focused on shock compression of condensed matter. Looking at materials and events closely has never been more fascinating, but we can do more with microscopes nowadays. If we look around, we will see that traditional fields of research are collaborating and evolving into new possibilities. One example is condensed matter and high pressure physics coming together to create techniques that can provide a snapshot of any event, be it microscopic or macroscopic, with high resolution and unprecedented speed. The tabletop shock wave apparatus that was built by Dr. Bhowmick and his coworkers have exciting potentials to offer, including but not limited to applications in materials science and engineering, geochemistry, biochemistry and cosmology.

Thursday, August 26th
Charlotte Alexander – Georgia State University
Text Mining for Bias: A Recommendation Letter Experiment
Charlotte S. Alexander is an associate professor of legal analytics at Georgia State University’s Robinson College of Business and director of its Legal Analytics Lab, which is a joint initiative with the Robinson College of Business the university’s College of Law. Alexander is a recipient of the Distinguished Early Career Faculty Award from the Academy of Legal Studies in Business in 2016 and was also named to the Fastcase 50 list of Legal Innovators. Prior to her academic career, Alexander worked as an employment lawyer and represented women facing discrimination and harassment on the job.

Friday, August 27th
Ricia Anne Chansky – University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez
Community Responses After Disasters
Ricia Anne Chansky is professor of literature.  She is the co-editor of the scholarly journal, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, a member of the Routledge Literature Portfolio of journals, and editor of the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series. Her book publications include the co-edited volumes: The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader, a Routledge Literary Theory Reader (2016); Life Writing Outside the Lines: Gender and Genre in the Americas (Routledge, 2020); and, The Untied States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century (U of Wisconsin P, forthcoming). She has also edited two books: Auto/Biography across the Americas: Transnational Themes in Life Writing (Routledge, 2017) and Auto/Biography in the Americas: Relational Lives (Routledge, 2016). Currently, she is at work on an edited collection of oral histories of Hurricane María, which is under contract with Haymarket Books, and a single-author book on narrating disaster. Her forthcoming children’s book, Maxy Survives the Hurricane/Maxy sobrevive al huracán, was co-authored with a student in the Department of English and is forthcoming from Arte Público Press.