The Academic Minute from 09.13 – 09.17
Monday, September 13th
Dana Ferraris – McDaniel College
Discovering Anti-Viral Drugs to Treat COVID-19
Dana Ferraris, associate professor of Chemistry and the John Desmond Kopp Professorship in the Sciences, began teaching at McDaniel College in 2015 as a visiting professor before joining the faculty as associate professor in 2017. At McDaniel, he teaches organic chemistry and medicinal chemistry. He has also mentored undergraduate students completing student-faculty research and has most recently worked with students on research to discover drugs to fight COVID-19.
Tuesday, September 14th
Kenneth Sider – Skidmore College
Confronting Whiteness in the Teacher Education Classroom
Dr. Kenneth Sider has served as a public-school teacher in upstate New York, an adjunct lecturer at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College, and is presently a visiting assistant professor at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. As an elementary school teacher, his classroom was a space for liberatory pedagogy, experiential learning, student-initiated social justice campaigns, projects to promote social responsibility, thematic instruction, arts-integration, artist residencies, community collaborations, disability awareness and advocacy, and democratic classroom principles. He has been awarded twelve artist residency grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, three private grants to fund drumming in the elementary classroom, and the New York African Studies Association’s Distinguished Teacher Award.
Wednesday, September 15th
Ryan Romine – Shenandoah University
A Radical Investment in Learning through Collaborative Exploration in the Arts
Bassoonist, educator, and administrator Ryan D. Romine is Assistant Dean for Recruitment at Shenandoah Conservatory (Winchester, VA, USA), where in the past three years he has overseen the recruitment of three of the largest incoming classes in the Conservatory’s history. He is also a co-creator of Shenandoah Conservatory’s groundbreaking collaborative learning venture, ShenCoLAB. As a bassoonist, he has dedicated himself to a career of presenting classic, rediscovered, and new works to audiences worldwide. His debut solo album of French contest pieces, Première, was hailed as “an absolutely brilliant CD . . . bringing back from oblivion some truly beautiful music, played with precision and lyricism,” and his rediscovery of Jacques Ibert’s Morceau de lecture for bassoon and piano in 2018 made international news.
Thursday, September 16th
Torsa Ghosal – California State University Sacramento
What Contemporary Literature Tells Us about Forgetting
Torsa Ghosal is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, with research and teaching interests in cognitive cultural studies, narrative theory, global Anglophone literature, multimodality, and comparative media studies.
She received a B.A from St. Xavier’s College (Calcutta), a M.A from Jadavpur University in India, and a Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University. She has been a visiting scholar in the Literature and Media Innovation program at the University of Leuven, Belgium.
Friday, September 17th
Eban Goodstein – Bard College
Educators and Climate Change
Goodstein is an economist and Director of the Center for Environmental Policy and the MBA in Sustainability at Bard. In recent years, Goodstein has coordinated a series of national educational initiatives on climate change involving over 2500 colleges, universities, high schools and community organizations. He is the author of a college textbook, Economics and the Environment now in its ninth edition; Fighting for Love in the Century of Extinction: How Passion and Politics Can Stop Global Warming; and The Trade-off Myth: Fact and Fiction about Jobs and the Environment. Articles by Goodstein have appeared in among other outlets, The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, and Environmental Management.
